Lessons From a Gaming Industry Entrepreneur With Anthony Castoro

February 20, 2024

Lessons From a Gaming Industry Entrepreneur With Anthony Castoro

Anthony Castoro is the Owner of Protagonist Games, an independent games and technology company specializing in multiplayer and online games. He is also the Founder and CEO of Simulation Theory, a proprietary technologies platform yielding incredible high-performance results for video games, AR/VR, real-time AI applications, and industrial simulations. A gaming industry veteran, Anthony has led teams in developing cutting-edge technologies and immersive gaming environments. With a passion for pushing the boundaries of interactive entertainment, he continues to drive innovation and deliver unforgettable experiences to gamers worldwide.

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

Anthony Castoro discusses Protagonist Games and his background in gaming
Why Anthony prefers operating a remote company
The inspiration for Simulation Theory and its mission
Anthony reflects on his involvement with MaxPlay
Will there be another game engine that disrupts the market?
Anthony shares his entrepreneurial journey and the lessons he learned
Alternative paths to enter the game development industry
Anthony’s experience working for Heat Wave while going through an acquisition
Advice for aspiring gaming entrepreneurs
Why entrepreneurs should have mentors or an executive coach

In this episode…

Entering the realm of gaming entrepreneurship demands a fusion of passion, tenacity, and strategic acumen. What insights can aspiring entrepreneurs glean from accomplished trailblazers as they navigate the intricacies of this vibrant industry?

Video game pioneer Anthony Castoro’s venture into the gaming industry began with a passion for creating immersive and engaging experiences for players. However, his entrepreneurial journey wasn't without challenges. Like many startup founders, Anthony faced obstacles along the way, from funding constraints to market competition. His resilience and determination guided him, teaching him invaluable lessons about perseverance and adaptability. One of his key takeaways is the importance of non-traditional paths in game development. Anthony encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to explore alternative avenues, such as self-teaching, online courses, or participating in game jams. These non-traditional paths not only offer valuable learning experiences but also provide opportunities to showcase creativity and talent.

In the latest episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, Lizzie Mintus sits down with Anthony Castoro, Owner of Protagonist Games, to delve into insights and guidance for budding gaming enthusiasts. Anthony reflects on his journey spanning Protagonist Games, Simulation Theory, MaxPlay, and Heat Wave, offering alternative avenues into game development and underscoring the pivotal role of mentorship.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

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 Mintus, 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 get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the 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.

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a thank you to Wallace Holter for introducing us. Wallace knows everybody and is an industry legend. Today we have Anthony Castoro with us. Anthony is the CEO and co-founder of Simulation Theory. Owner of Protagonist Games and Chairman of HiDef Entertainment. Some people ask why he starts so many companies. Anthony believes there are a lot of problems to solve in our industry and he enjoys helping passionate people come together and solve them.

Thanks for being here, Anthony. Let's get started. You have three companies. What one do you want to talk about first?

Anthony Castoro: The one that's the center that allows me to do what I do is Protagonist Games. The other companies have come out of those efforts, and Protagonist came about just because of the experiences I've had in the game industry and my last corporate role and realizing that I need to be in charge of my own destiny again.

I founded that company and I think 2018. Part of the initial vision was that it was always going to be remote. So I'd done so much work, early in my career in the online space. And then just throughout my games industry career, people are all over the place. It was never, everybody's in one office. And I thought as an entrepreneur, I can really reduce costs and let people work from home, which they like. Especially a lot of the sort of engineers and people that need to focus, they just having their own space and being able to do that. And so I thought I was really on to something and for a good two years, that was just us.

Now everybody was doing it.

Lizzie Mintus: They're not.

Anthony Castoro: No, they're going back, yeah. That's a real estate problem, not an actual how to work together problem.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's a big controversy right now. So you will be staying fully remote.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. Yeah. Unless I end up in a situation where the team wants to be together, needs to be together. We can always make those accommodations. But our DNA is that we work remote. And yesterday we had our company holiday party and for folks that are in Southern California and a bunch of people drove and got together and had lunch and all that kind of stuff. People in other states were on virtually. And maybe next year we'll go to a different area of the country and do the same thing.

People stay with the company and enjoy the company because partially that fact. They really enjoy being able to work from home and the flexibility that it gives them. And actually I found that people are more productive in that role. And if you have the right people, but a lot of the right people in the game industry like to work that way.

Lizzie Mintus: Definitely. And I think a lot of companies are doing RTO except for their high performer or their shiny person who then they allow it to be remote. And that's so hard too.

Anthony Castoro: That has always been one of the indicators that made me think that this was going to be a good idea. Because I'd seen that too at companies before this trend where there's just some badass software engineer and she needed to be working from home and you weren't gonna let her go. You're gonna be like, okay, we've solved this problem. If we could solve it for one person, we could probably solve it for everybody.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk more about what Protagonist actually does, what you're working on?

Anthony Castoro: Sure. We're an independent game developer that does work for hire, right? We help other people with their projects. That came about because through my career, I'm actually going to turn 50 at the beginning of 2024. So I've been reflecting a bit. I had a couple of times started companies, using work for hire as a way to bootstrap for capital. And then focused on the game that we were going to make and raising capital that way and moved away from that kind of work. In some cases when things didn't work out the way we had hoped, gone back to work for hire to keep the doors open and found that was very effective as well. But I always saw it as the thing you fall back on. I was always able to do it. It was always very fulfilling to find people that had a problem that needed solving, being able to bring teams together to do that. So I said, this time I'm going to focus on that. That's actually going to be what I do. And it's been great.

We're currently working with some great companies, Visual Concepts. We got to ship WWE 2K23 with a fantastic team working on their multiplayer features. We've worked with Electronic Arts and a bunch of different great companies. That has provided it a great form of stability for a network of game developers who are very experienced, very reliable, like a different challenge. I like to say we're trying to create a forever home for unicorns and people seem to appreciate that.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and I imagine your team likes to work on hard problems. They get to jump around and solve a bunch of different hard problems.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, there are great companies out there that are lower cost. Game devs, content, builders and that kind of thing were more sort of the high end. Really hard engineering problems, advanced design challenges, we like to be involved in helping, particularly difficult technical challenges. Everything from back end scaling, we did some work with big corporations like retail, that want to do augmented reality for their stores eventually and roll that out across the world, helping them figure out how to scale their back end because there's so many similarities to that kind of service as there is to running an MMO.

Lizzie Mintus: Same problem in a different context.

Anthony Castoro: Yep.

Lizzie Mintus: What about Simulation Theory?

Anthony Castoro: Sim Theory, the name is a hint that at what we're doing there. It came out of protagonist game. So I've worked with my co founder, Randy Kelly and a few other people for years. We've known each other for 15 years and worked on some game engine technology in the past.

Simulation Theory is the idea that we're all already in the matrix, right? And some people subscribe to that idea. Elon Musk will talk about it and he's talked about having a rule with his brother. They don't talk about simulation theory in the hot tub or something like that. But, if you wanted to create an interactive experience that was so realistic that you couldn't tell the difference between it and reality, you would have to be able to use all of the compute power, local, remote, available to you.

That's really what we focus on is unlocking the compute power around you. Because, it's a dirty little secret that most game engines that exist today, don't scale very well across multiple cores on a CPU. So if you're a gamer, like a PC gamer, and you bring up your task manager and you look at your CPU utilization when you're playing a game, you'll often notice you might have a 12 core machine or something, but only three of them are really doing anything.

And it's a hard problem to solve, like parallel compute and distributed computer are tough topics. Games are already hard so there are a lot of problems to solve. And we've had a lot of great hardware to work with, so it hasn't necessarily been the primary thing that people are worried about, but as people try to create bigger, richer experiences with AI generative AI in real time or ultra realistic experiences- I think about games like Cyberpunk, which I really enjoyed. But you go out into the world of the crowd and you go to a vendor and you're like, I wonder how much I can interact with this character. There are always very clear limitations on what can be done in a simulation these days.

Our goal is to unlock the potential that's already on everyone's desktop. Our technology is able to scale up over 1024 cores on a CPU, which you can't even get yet, but also scale across multiple computers locally and remote, which is really exciting. That's technology that we've been developing. Basically the guys came to me at Protagonist Games and said we want to work on this problem again, and we have an idea, a new architecture about how to do it. So I let them work one day a week on it, for about two years until we found a customer that had a problem.

They're using an existing game engine and they were doing some kind of dance game. And they can only get a handful of characters on the screen at the frame rate that they wanted. We were able to use this new technology to literally do tens of thousands of animations on screen on the same hardware. That really cemented to me that this was this was gonna be something. So we decided to spin that out as its own company called Simulation Theory.

Lizzie Mintus: Great. You found a need. You did some testing. And many people from Simulation Theory come from MaxPlay, is that correct?

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, right now, all of them.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, so I was researching MaxPlay before our podcast, and I saw this incredible video on YouTube called Introducing MaxPlay Game Development Suite. And at one point someone's it's like Google Docs for game development, and then they throw the phone over their shoulder.

Anthony Castoro: San Francisco, yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I was also looking at the team, like what a crazy incredible team you have. David Yee from Guerrilla Tag, Sinjin at Tencent, Bill Young at Twitch. So many people have gone on to

Anthony Castoro: Some of my favorite people, yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: Do the craziest things. Can you share a little bit about Max Play? That has such an influence on what you're doing, right?

Anthony Castoro: It's part of the backstory. So I had been at EA. EA had acquired my company, Heatwave Interactive, and we became EA mobile in Austin. I did that for a little while. The corporate world has never been my happy place. There are times where it has been great. There are a couple of times I actually worked at EA where I was. Some of my best memories, but they're very entrepreneurial times in those companies.

So anyway, I decided to start doing work for hire again, got hired as a consultant at Max Play and Max Play's offices were my old Heatwave offices for my startup. Small world in Austin, Texas. Randy Cully, his game engine that he wrote, was the foundation for that. So Technicolor bought it and incubated Max Play and then spun it out as his own startup. And, I had met Randy at Heatwave. He was my head graphics guy and he is brilliant. So small world.

Lizzie Mintus: The backstory, I tried to recruit Randy when he left Max Play and went to Amazon for years. Full circle.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, and rightly

Lizzie Mintus: He's someone you work on for a long time, but he's with you now, so I won't turn him away.

Anthony Castoro: No, you can't have him. So yeah, I came in as a consultant and explain they're doing some amazing work and they were doing two things really.

On the game engine side, one was a precursor to what we're doing at Sim Theory, which was this idea of scaling. And they could scale up, 24 cores or something like that, which is still a lot. They were doing this sort of Google Docs for game development idea, which, again, came from a lot of our multiplayer experience working on MMOs.

When I got started in the game industry as a game designer, and my first real game design job was on Ultima Online, we were working in a client server environment. Half the time our work was in the software, almost like playing a multiplayer game with other developers going, did this work? Try this. So that was a really cool idea. But creating a game engine from the ground up with all of the problems that you could try to solve from performance to workflow was a tall order.

Sinjin was the CEO when I joined, he and I had worked together at EA previously. Amazing guy and one of the most connected people I know in the space. By the way, he's on my board at Sim Theory, right? At the moment that I realized we were going to try something similar, I wanted his involvement and he's been great.

Maxplay did some really great stuff. Unfortunately, we got to a point where they couldn't bridge their funding because building a game engine from scratch to something that an independent game developer or someone using Unity could switch to it is a tough job. That's a huge investment. I think our guess at the time was it was at least 30 million. And I think we probably got halfway there.

Lizzie Mintus: And then, think about what it would be now. Probably much more.

Anthony Castoro: Oh, yeah. With Sim Theory, you take those lessons in mind. Our goal- they can use our technology with a game engine they're already using, in many cases. We're signing some contracts now with people that are using Unity or using Unreal, but they have very specific performance challenges with the software that if we take it and we really do what we do or we scale it on hardware and then hand it back to the game engine, that can oftentimes really unlock a lot for them.

So we're not asking people to natively switch over to our technology. We're trying to work with their workflows. Cause look, I know game developers. It's the hardest form of entertainment in the world has all the problems. And people want to keep their workflows and not have to figure something out new.

And so our strategy is, you know what, we're going to enhance what you do as opposed to try to make you start over.

Lizzie Mintus: Do you think that there will be another game engine that will, I hate the word disrupt, but disrupt the market. Do you think it's if possible, at this point?

Anthony Castoro: That's funny. My cat muted me for a second. We have a kitten running around the office.

I do think it's possible. I think it's needed. I think it's also likely that anyone that comes along to disrupt is likely to try someone will try to acquire them. That's already a player in that space, which is okay for the user, again, it helps not disrupt their flow. But despite how great the sort of industry leaders are in the engine space, the core architectures are still pretty old school. So the limitations on trying to scale across many cores or be natively multi node, it's really hard to go and change that while supporting all of your existing customers.

Anthony Castoro: While it's not like our mission is to go unseat Unity or Unreal or anything like that, it is to solve some problems that they're not solving. If we get to the point where we have enough adoption and enough investment that we could be an entire solution. Okay, great. We do believe that's the only way to get maximum performance out of the hardware because. I don't want to get too technical on the call and also, I'm not a software engineer. I'm a self taught hacker who got into the game industry. But the way we've structured our total packages is pretty unique. There'll be some patents in the process of being filed around that will give us some pretty cool advantages.

But we don't see people wanting to use our solution natively. It's a replacement for years. Which is fine. We have a great business to build.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. The best is yet to come. So I want to jump into the early days of your career. Your first job on LinkedIn is founding a company called Integrated Visions.

And then you started another company called Internet Book Source.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: What were these companies? Was that like a precursor to Amazon?

Anthony Castoro: I have a funny Amazon story. If we go way back, my dad was a chemist, and then businessman working in the chemical industry. My mom was a romance novelist. And so I guess that's how you get a game designer. You bring a scientist and a writer together. I had lots of challenges in school and structure in the structure of school. But I was, lucky enough to have great resources enough wherewithal to go to the University of Texas and meet some fascinating people in the early nineties. That's where I really got into realize that maybe I could make video games. I was on the internet relay chat IRC. She used to joke, stood for I repeat classes, but it was like the discord of today. I met some other like minded people who were CS majors at UT and artists and that kind of thing.

And I just realized I wasn't gonna be able to finish college because I could be in a really interesting class, an astronomy course and being the top couple of students. Just couldn't get myself to go to class for that American history to that. I forgot to test out over

Lizzie Mintus: Were the same. If I care, I really care. And if I don't care, I don't care at all.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. Unsurprisingly, later on in my life as an adult, I was diagnosed with ADHD, right? But I didn't know that at the time. All I knew is I was good at what I was and very bad at things I wasn't interested in. And my solution for that was to find other people who were good at and interested in doing those other things.

So I started to realize, I was in Austin, maybe I could make games for a living. So I called my dad and told him I was dropping out of the University of Texas, starting a video game company and it's like working as a lens tech at Lens Crafters on the side. And then I had another gig as a tech company doing development while I paid for these other guys to work on a game at Integrated Visions.

At the same time, my mom, who I mentioned was an author, wanted a homepage back in the day. We're talking like 94, 95, somewhere in there. So I made something called the Internet Book Source where I could promote her books, put up excerpts, show the book covers, which ones are in stores now. And then all of her friends wanted a web page, a home page, and some of them are New York Times bestsellers. And so I had 35, 40 authors on the Internet Book Source.

This is a true story. I was very much doing that as a hobby just for my mom and her friends. I had this game company that I was building, and we had this great idea, and we were working on it. And I get this email from this guy named Jeff, who says that he's got a warehouse in the Amazon. This is how I read this. At warehouse in the Amazon. And if I wanted to, I could let people order through our site and he could fulfill the book shipments at a much lower cost.

And I was like, that doesn't make any damn sense. How are you going to ship books from another continent? And it was literally an email from Jeff Bezos. My wife framed that a few years later and put it on the wall and won't let me live it down. Who's this guy with a warehouse in the Amazon?

So yeah, true story. And that's that's kind of life. It's you never know what's going to happen or you have to make decisions based on what you're interested in. The website did really well for a while and was really helpful for my mom and her friends. You get when you don't get what you want from a startup, which is experience.

Lizzie Mintus: You built character like Calvin and Hobbes says.

Anthony Castoro: That's right. We built character. So I learned a lot about starting a company, running a company, and about the relationships and the pressures that go into that. My partner, who was the software engineer, had some stuff that happened and it made it so that we couldn't really run the company. And I was like, I'm going to go get a real job in the game industry. I managed to find a job at at Origin and in QA. That was a fantastic experience. There's some legendary stuff that happened there too, but I met Warren Spector, who really inspired me to really move into game design. Cause the only job I could get at first was in QA. But some of the people I met in QA in the mid nineties are still great relationships now, and they're doing amazing things in the industry- creative directors, executive producers.

I learned a lot in that phase and it was also very much different time in the 90s. So there's some drama there. I'm like, can I tell this story? When I went there to the job fair, you went into this fish bowl. And everyone was sitting there, waiting to be called for their interview. It was just off the lobby from the entrance. And I was the last person in the room. And after about 20, 25 minutes, nobody had come in and call my name and I waited another like 45 minutes or something.

I don't know what's going on. I go out of the room and there's nobody there. They left. And I went up to the elevator and I think it was the 3rd floor of the origin building to go to the parking lot and I come out the elevator on the 3rd floor and I hear people talking. It's a Saturday. That should tell you something that people are working. So I just wander into this office where people are working at Origin on a Saturday. And a woman says, can I help you? And I said, I was here for the job fair and nobody ever called my number. And she's oh my gosh, did we forget you? And I'm like, yes. She goes, I can't believe we did that. Do you still want a job? What do you have? She goes I have a QA job. Sure. Can you start on Monday? Sure. So that's how I got my first job in the industry.

And then two days later, Warren Spector comes by as the producer of the game I'm working on. He's oh, you're our new QA guy. What were you doing before this? I'm like I had my own game company. And he said, oh, really? I said, yeah. He goes, did you make a game? I said, we've got a demo. Yeah, you should bring it by. I brought it by the next day and showed him Hover Blades. He's what are you doing in QA? It was the only job I could get. It's a funny story, but I ended up having to stay in QA because of a policy about QA people not moving into development for the first year. And then suddenly wasn't employed a year later. That was a strange thing that happened. They brought me back as a game designer a couple of years after.

Lizzie Mintus: It all worked out.

Anthony Castoro: It all worked out.

Lizzie Mintus: I want to highlight this because sometimes I talk to younger people. I recruit people that are a lot more senior, but many college grads reach out to me to help me find a job. And I point them to some resources on my podcast. Listen to Sonya Michaels. There's some great stuff, but I think it's really important to highlight that you had your own company and then you worked in QA for a year. I'm sure you made so many great connections and started your career there. And so many people do, but I think it's okay to work in QA.

It's great to work in QA.

Anthony Castoro: You learn so much in QA. If you have the right attitude as a collaborator, as someone who's curious and wants to help, you can learn so much because you learn about production. You learn about how the different systems work together, how the teams work together. You learn how devs think and communicate. I'm not saying that's the best place to start, but it is a good place to start if that's what you can get. And in my situation, there were politics and people were mad that I got offered to be a game designer after a couple of days there. Actually got fired on a technicality exactly one year later. So there's some drama or whatever, but I ended up back there as a lead game designer and help them online.

I also had a demo, I had rolled up my sleeves and I had a startup. We made a demo with what we could learn. If you looked at it now, you'd laugh at that piece of software, but to a producer who was talking to a QA guy- oh, here's what you've done. What did you learn? Why did you do it this way? Oh, this kid's pretty smart. Maybe you know what? We've got an entry level design position you should apply for that. Yeah, I definitely think rolling up your sleeves and trying to make games is 100 percent the right thing to do if you're trying to break into this industry.

Yeah. Now there's so many more tools.

Lizzie Mintus: I think there's no excuse for why you don't have a portfolio together when you're an entry level person and applying for a job. I always send people to Global Game Jam. I think that's great and you can make a game with other people, meet new people, find a mentor, have something to show. But you have to put in work.

Anthony Castoro: That's the challenge though. Making games is a team sport. And that's the other thing. If you have a portfolio, it's really important to point out what it is that you contributed. It's not always obvious.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and people can make assumptions on many things, but if you just have a bunch of stuff on your portfolio and you don't say what you did and didn't do, I've heard hiring managers are upset because they feel like maybe this person is trying to take credit for work they didn't do

Anthony Castoro: that's one lens to look at it through. The lens that I would look at it through is how good of a communicator is this person?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, there's many issues, but you don't know what people are gonna think or the lens which they're gonna look.

Anthony Castoro: That's my point. If I'm the hiring manager and I see a video footage of a scene in a game without an explanation it's did they make the video? Did they make the character? Did they animate it? Did they do the tech? Maybe they're the lighting? There's so much that you have to ask.

And so the question is immediately, how good of a communicator is the candidate? How long do they think about what they're trying to communicate?

Lizzie Mintus: That's a good rule for anything though.

If you have an interesting career change, you have a gap in history, people are going to make assumptions. That's your job is to judge someone when you're recruiting or you're the hiring manager. So overly explain. Hey, this took care of my family, had a kid, went back to school, decided I wanted to change careers. It is fine, but people assume and they may think it's not fine.

I want to hear more about Ultima Online. I had Raph on my podcast and he had some great stories about working in the cold and typing with fingerless gloves. Were you fingerless gloving?

Anthony Castoro: I don't remember that story but there's so many. Ultima Online was fascinating. I was at the end of my QA stint there, spending my evenings hanging out in Raph's office with his wife and some other people that were working on the project, learning about the game because the day before I got let go, I was going to become the lead tester for Ultima Online.

So it was a crushing thing to leave, but I came back as a game designer on that project. It was a fascinating experience to work that early on something that groundbreaking. Mistakes were made and things were learned, but I have nothing but, but fond memories of that. And working with Raph, who's brilliant. And again, more people from those projects that today, right now at Protagonist Games, one of my senior engineers was a server programmer on Ultima Online.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. Those relationships, and knowing what people are capable of and what they've done in the past is so helpful in being able to figure out what can be done in the future.

Lizzie Mintus: What stories do you have about what went right? What went wrong? Your learnings.

Anthony Castoro: 1 of the interesting things about that project and 1 of the reasons I was able to get hired as a game designer on it was that they were primarily Unix based. I taught myself programming essentially through scripting, shell scripting, almost all in Solaris and Vax and VMS. The environment in which we worked was very unusual for game development because it was writing code in Unix platform, but taking advantage of that very powerful platform to be able to do things in real time and do them quickly.

I learned a lot about community management from that, right? As I became a lead designer very quickly. Learning to communicate with the audience and figure out that balance between transparency and openness, but not over promising and getting that balance right. And figuring out who to listen to and who not to listen to. There's a lot of learning there.

So people who know me in the space, especially from that time, I to bring up one of my biggest mistakes in that, which was- we were doing an expansion and rumor had gotten out about what that expansion was. It was distracting the team because the community was getting all worked up about it. The rumor was technically wrong, but essentially right, I got on there and said, y'all are wrong. And I shouldn't have.

Technically, yeah, they were wrong, but the thing that was upsetting them, the thing that made them think about it a certain way, they were right. But I was trying to take the pressure off the team. Ultimately, the game came out, and it did well. But the thing that I said didn't ring as true.

I had a great mentor at the time and someone who was brought in by Gordon Walton, who I know you've interviewed as well.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, Gordon's so great.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, and I learned a lesson there. I wanted to protect my team. I wanted them to be able to focus. I was frustrated with the trolls. And I let it get to me in a way that caused me to mislead the audience. And you can't do that. You cannot do that. So either shut up or be willing to tell them what's actually going on. And I prefer the latter. It's just transparency.

Lizzie Mintus: You could use that lesson in relationships, too.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: You don't tell them you're wrong.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. I was in my early 20s, and it was the Wild West. But there's a lot of learning from that. You could talk about Ultima Online for weeks, just because It was one of the first to really have all these challenges, including the technical environment, which was fascinating.

We had things like, as a game designer, you don't think about things the way, a software engineer does. And you're like, Oh, I've got the ability to like, shrink this piece of art down. Oh, I could take this horse. I could shrink it down and make it a statue with just a little script code and scale it. Then everybody in the game ends up with a horse statue and the engineers come and get mad at you because all those horses have horse AI on them and they're all thinking like horses, even though they're not doing anything. Oh, yeah, I guess we need to do that a little bit differently.

So figuring out the difference between prototyping something and making it production worthy, there are a lot of lessons in Ultima Online about that because the tech was so powerful. You could do almost anything, but you maybe shouldn't do some of those things, right? You would prove the concept and then work with the engineers and they'd figure the right way to actually implement it. But that prototyping to production pipeline and experience of trial and error and how to work with the team and the production process for taking something from an idea to the customer was incredible learning experience for me.

Lizzie Mintus: I want to also talk about Heat Wave because you touched on that earlier and then it was required by EA. What was Heat wave and what can you talk about in terms of the acquisition?

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. It was what we call a soft landing. I had some really great opportunities at EA, did some amazing things because of Ultima online. Ended up relocating out to the West coast, San Francisco, and relocating most of the team from Austin to San Francisco.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you touch on that too? How did you manage to relocate the team? I feel like that's an important piece for people that are trying to do RTO right now.

Anthony Castoro: So I don't know what the right term is, but I've been very lucky with teams and having really great relationships with the teams that I work with.

And I guess, people matter to me. I don't know what it is about my upbringing, about the way that I grew up. I mentioned my mom was a romance novelist, my dad's a chemist. Also, my mom. Is a black woman from Texas and Arkansas, who passes as they say, but she's black. My dad is an Italian kid from Brooklyn and New Orleans, and they met at Howard. And so I grew up in, in Texas as a biracial kid. I guess I always felt like I was on the outside of a lot of things. And so I spent a lot of time, empathizing, I think with people who feel on the outside.

And I think that helped me build up a skill set for just really wanting to understand and connect with people and their motivations and what they're trying to do. I do a lot of that in my spare time helping people in this industry or get in this industry, and it's also partially, I think, why I spent so much time with solving problems the way I like to. It's about helping other people.

That's a long preamble to say, I think I had really good trust and understanding with the team. The decision to relocate or to shut down Origin was out of our hands. But there were other teams at Origin who did not relocate. They broke up, they went other places. But the core of the majority of the U O team relocated to the Bay area.

I think a lot of that had to do with understanding the value of Ultima Online still. I think originally the forecast was six months and we were on year five. And we were profitable every year and, still breaking records. So I went to everyone to figure out what they needed to relocate. And I brought that back to corporate and I negotiated very hard.

Lizzie Mintus: Of course, I feel like that's you.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, and still friends with a lot of those people. Most of us didn't end up staying in the Bay Area, but some did. But this gets the Heat Wave in that. I learned a lot about business in that phase of my career at EA. I had a great mentor who sat me down and was like, this is how corporate financials work. This is what a P& L is.

Eventually I became a producer and I owned the P& L, the profit and loss sheet. This is what EBITDA is and why it matters. All this business stuff, which I love. When I started my first company, I was like, I had little MBA books and I was into it.

Then I took a job to help Codemasters build their online gaming group in the UK. So I relocated with my family in the UK and we launched some of the first free to play Korean games in the West, and then we were the publisher for Dungeons and Dragons online in Europe and Lord of the Rings online in North America and Europe.

I was very quickly able to come in and build a lot of value for that company and realize that, hey, I'm not really participating in the value that I'm creating.

Lizzie Mintus: Entrepreneur mindset. Yeah.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. Also as I flew around the world, looking for projects to sign and publish- literally around the world. Once I circumnavigate the world in 10 days on a business trip, I would come into a game studio and very quickly be able to go, okay, this is what's great. This is what isn't and usually there were a couple of things that were obvious to me that were missing and why this was going to be a problem or what needed to be solved. I built a lot of relationships doing that, but I just knack for being able to come into a game development environment and go if you change this and this, , and they'd be like, oh, and then they do that, and then things would be much better.

So I decided, maybe I should just be doing that for myself. I met a like minded individual who had been the CEO of some other startups in the interactive space and had a couple of exits. He made a great candidate as the CEO. I had this idea about making MMOs. So at the time you have World Warcraft and you had some great sci-fi, MMOs, mostly fantasy and sci-fi, and nothing in the context of, could I relate to it in an everyday context.

This is a metaverse idea, right? Getting Pizza Hut delivered in World of Warcraft didn't make a lot of sense, but if you could create an online game experience that was in the context of the modern world, suddenly there are a lot of commercial opportunities that we're really interesting, that could add value to the experience and also help fund these really expensive gains, right?

So our goal was to go out and raise $150 million to do several MMOs. We had specific concepts and we packaged 'em all up. But the way that I started that, as I bootstrapped it using consulting. And so we made a million dollars in the first year, just three of us.

And that was a lot of money in 2006, seven, whatever.

Lizzie Mintus: It's like 2 million today.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, exactly. And for just a couple of people in Texas, right? And so the cost of living was lower. It was great. That meant we didn't have to have jobs, so we could work on this idea. And so eventually my partner and I, we did the whole Sand Hill Road, New York, East Coast. There wasn't a lot of VC funding for video games in Texas. We eventually found, a couple of VCs that really bought into the idea and we ended up going with one and raised seven and a half million dollars in the Series A. It was 2008 in May of 2008 is when we raised that money, which for those of you that don't remember, that's the great recession.

The housing collapse, and we were going to turn around and go and raise 150 million for private equity, and it was gone. It just disappeared. So at the same time, there's some other trends happening. Mobile gaming was starting. Facebook gaming was huge. So by 2010, we had taken some of these ideas and adapted them to mobile and social gaming. I learned a lot in that experience.

I did the first digital download deal for in the music industry with Universal Music. We got an incredible split that no one will ever get again. And we had all kinds of amazing artists for the IP that we were building. I got to know the music industry. I was on a video shoot for T. I. 's music video with Rihanna. It's crazy. We did a lot of amazing stuff, but we couldn't raise that capital to do what we wanted. We really had a core MMO PC console sort of game group and, learned very quickly that the things that worked in social and mobile didn't match one to one and didn't match the motivations of a lot of the people who were working at the company at the time.

So we had to go through a pretty strong transition. In that process of raising the money, building all this, having the former president of Lucasfilm on the board, and all kinds of amazing stuff. But the board made me the CEO and made me fire my partner. It was a trial by fire. I learned a lot about that and about myself. When we couldn't raise additional capital the way we needed to, and our VC was even struggling, we were one of the last. Portfolio companies that were still operating by, was it 2012, 2013? We went back to work for hire and we did a bunch of great work. EA was one of our clients. They liked what we were doing so much that they decided to scoop us up. It wasn't the big exit everybody was looking for, but I took care of all my people. They all got raises. They all got jobs at a great company, working on some really cool stuff.

And I got to work again with someone, my boss was Chip Lang, who I had met previously at EA, who used to run EA Sports. He's on that team that did, that's in the game, it's in the game. That thing? He had come to online and I really liked him and he's the guy that I ended up working for. And now he's the CEO of one of my other startups, which is Hi Def. Small world.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and you boomeranged. You've had a lot of EA in your career.

Anthony Castoro: I worked at EA four times. I worked other places too, though. Sony and

Lizzie Mintus: yeah, I don't even have a word for that. Quadruple boomerang.

Anthony Castoro: They tried to recruit me again. I think four was enough.

Lizzie Mintus: No, that'd be funny. You can just hop back and forth. I've never seen that. I've seen a lot of different profiles. I don't think I've seen four times, so congrats.

Anthony Castoro: Hey, it's a different experience every time for different reasons, but I've learned a lot.

Lizzie Mintus: Builds character, learned a lot.

I don't like to ask about regrets, but if you were to tell yourself something when you were younger that you've learned now, or somebody that wants to start their own company, what's the top advice that you would give them?

Anthony Castoro: The people that you go into business with matter the most. Before you decide how to organize your company, really make sure that you understand who you're going into business with as much as possible. Or understand how much you don't know that and factor that in as a risk. Starting a company, it's like a marriage, first of all. It can be incredibly tough and you might think someone and their motivations, but you don't really know until things get difficult. Your 10 million guaranteed deal disappears because someone's stock price drops 80 percent because of market forces you have no control over. You don't know how people are going to behave. I would say just really be clear with yourself about who you're going into business with, what they're going to do for the company and why and make sure as best you can that all those things are aligned.

And the 2nd piece that goes to that is make sure you have a great lawyer. I don't mean some people might hear that and think, oh, so you can sue people. No, find a great lawyer that's got lots of experience working with startups and can give you a great advice about how to set up the company, about how to navigate the challenges that you will inevitably face. I've had a couple of fantastic attorneys that I don't think I could have done half the things I've done with without them.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I love my attorney. She's very helpful. She helps me with all kinds of things.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah. Yeah. And you're on the right path when your attorney wants to invest too. But seriously, like I don't care if you're 20 and starting your first company. A good attorney is it going to try to drain you dry because there's no value in that for them. To find the right attorney who wants to help you in your scenario and has history of doing that kind of thing. I didn't get that advice early on. Luckily. I found that pretty quickly.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you find your lawyer? Referral? I always like to get referrals for those kinds of things.

Anthony Castoro: Yeah, absolutely. I'll plug mine. Jason Jones at Shepard Mullin is fantastic. I don't know if we're going to leave that in, in all seriousness, word of mouth. I have two.

I have a general counsel that works with me at, three. At a lot of my companies when I'm getting started. I have a corporate attorney and Jason Jones, and now I have a new great counsel at Rack Law Firm in L. A. Yeah, it's really important.

Lizzie Mintus: It is. Yeah. I have one last question.

Who, you mentioned some of your mentors. Who have been your strongest mentors? I'm sure there's a lot is the best advice that they've given you.

Anthony Castoro: So when I started Heat Wave, I wasn't the CEO, I was the co founder. I was the talent. That's what they called it. Then I became the CEO because I was doing the job. My partner wasn't able to do it the way it was needed to be done. I went out and I found an executive coach. He's not doing it anymore. He's retired. But another good piece of advice is, find a mentor. It took me six months to find this executive coach.

I interviewed a bunch of people and I had to find one that kind of got me. And that seemed to give me what I needed. One of the things I find challenging is I guess, because of my personality, not everyone feels comfortable telling me hard things. I don't think I'm scary, I have a strong personality. So I need someone who's going to tell me like it is. I don't need people to tell me what I already think, necessarily. He wasn't from my industry, actually. He was from another industry, but he was a business person and they understood business. The best piece of advice he gave me at the time, he gave me a lot.

He said, Anthony, I've looked at your business, I've interviewed your team, I've looked at your business plan. You guys are brilliant. You guys can do anything. You can do anything you wanna do, but you cannot do everything you wanna do. He is, focus . Yeah. You do that because I believe you set your mind to doing something and you'll do it. But he was pointing out like, Hey, you're trying to do three things. Do one and do it the best of your ability. That was great advice. It's always good advice. Focus is always good advice, especially to someone with ADHD, but that's how came to inform some of why I have multiple companies, which is you can't focus on multiple problems in one company, especially as a startup, right? It's too many things to try and accomplish. So I decided, look, if I'm going to help a group of people solve a problem, it needs to be its own thing. And then as it grows and matures, maybe it's going to have a different leader. Chip Lang is the CEO of High Def now, not me.

And so that's really informed my approach to a lot of things going forward. It's really good advice.

Lizzie Mintus: That is good advice. Yeah, I feel like that's the death of so many startups trying to do too many things. We've been talking to Anthony Castoro, a CEO and co-founder of Simulation Theory, owner of Protagonist Games, and chairman of HiDef.

Anthony, where can people go to learn about all of your companies or contact you?

Anthony Castoro: They can always contact me on LinkedIn. That's an easy place. If you want to know more about Sim Theory, you can go to simtheoryinc. com and check out our website, which we'll be updating shortly because our first public announcement and releases coming out. But yeah, you can always find me on LinkedIn.

Lizzie Mintus: Perfect. Thank you.

Anthony Castoro: Thank you. It 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.

Share this story