Robin Lavallée is the CEO and Co-Founder of Implicit Conversions, a company dedicated to bringing nostalgic games back to life by porting beloved classics to modern consoles using cutting-edge emulation technology. Their innovative software ensures that timeless games run seamlessly on today’s platforms, preserving gaming history for future generations.

In this episode, Robin shares his journey from working at industry giants like Ubisoft and Meta to founding his own company. Tune in to discover insights into his unexpected leap into entrepreneurship, the challenges and rewards of developing emulation technology, strategies for building and managing a remote team, and his vision for the future of video game hardware.

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

• How Robin’s team is revolutionizing retro gaming preservation
• The art of scaling technology for niche markets
• Why mentorship and perspective are key to leadership
• Insights into the future of video game hardware and emulation
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Robin Lavallée on Linkedin
• Implicit Conversions
• Implicit Conversions Discord
• Curiosity Based

Episode Transcript

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

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus. I'm the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is The Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we get to talk to creatives, founders, and executives about their journey. You will get to sneak peek into the future of the video game industry and hear lessons from their journey.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We focus on game and game adjacent tech and value quality over quantity. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Bill for introducing us and for hanging out with me at Dice. You're awesome. 

Today we have Robin Lavallée with us. Robin is originally from Canada and worked at Ubisoft, Prima, 2K games, and Meta. He CEO of Implicit Conversions which is a developer porting classic video games using emulation technology. Let's get started. Thank you for being here today. 

Robin Lavallée: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. 

Lizzie Mintus: I hope I did okay on your beautiful French name as an American.

Robin Lavallée: Almost. Lovely, yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: I did the best I could do. So today we're going to cover emulation technology, game hardware, accidental entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in general, and building a remote team. But first, I would love for you to share more about what Implicit Conversions is. 

Robin Lavallée: Yeah, so Implicit Conversions is a company that builds emulation technology.

And what does that mean is that, you know, we're doing port of games, but without the source code. So for most games, when you want to do is, let's say you take old games or any games, you say, well, I got this game on the Switch. I want it on the Xbox or PC. You get the source code, you play the game. You write the source code and build it and then that looks easy, but that's basically what people do. 

What we do is that we take old games, and sometimes many of those games from 20 years ago, games like what's on my background here, people don't have the source code. What they do, and there's all kinds of politics. People would ask, can you get the source code? Yeah, yeah, yeah, let me ask the manager over there, the server, and the things in backup in some farm somewhere. And so you don't get it. And so we use emulation to just run those games. 

You might say, well, emulation already exists on PCs and stuff like that. Yeah, it does, but we're talking mostly about consoles here. We believe form factors are important. So if you're playing a game, I don't know, let's say a Nintendo game, you want to play with a controller, and you're more likely to have a controller if you play on the Switch or on the PlayStation. And then sometimes you want value added features. Many of those old games, surprisingly, are frustrating for modern audiences. For example, you die all the time. So people ask to have a rewind feature or like a safe state feature- like, Oh, I just died. Okay. Just me rewind the game. And so that's basically what we do. So we've been doing technology and providing technology to either other developers or publishers to enable them to do this. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you started by accident. Can you please tell that story? I was going to ask you, were you having this problem? Did you really want to play some old game and you were feeling frustrated or how did it really play out? 

Robin Lavallée: Yeah, so I've always been like a retro gamer in the sense that I'm never up to date on my games. Basically, in my track record, I think I played like 10 hours on the PS3. It was Final Fantasy 13 and that's it. So I still have a big backlog to go there. So I guess I'm a good candidate to enjoy those old games. That being said, I had a job, not full time, like people have in the industry. I worked at Ubisoft, like you mentioned, and other companies, but I had contacts within bigger companies, and they wanted us to do things like, hey, can you guys help us with this simulation software thing, and it's an experimental project. No, you're not going to be employees. This is the contract for you, blah, blah, blah. All right, let's do this. 

Now I have a full time job and a part time job. Okay. And then at my part time job, I was kind of successful. They're like, well, can you get more stuff done? And I'm like, yeah, but now it's a full time job. Now I have two full time jobs. Then I realizedI'm going to fail both full time job if I don't quit one of them. So I had to make a choice. And it might sound cringe here, but the choices are easy to make when you think long term. Like do I keep the easy, comfortable job? And then when I'm old, I will say, Oh 30 years ago, 40 years ago, I had this choice I could have made. Never did it. I don't know what could have happened. 

Or do I take this new job, you know, quit my comfortable job. Do it, and then I won't regret it if it fails. I would say, well, I tried something. I learned something from it. And I'm going to reuse that experience elsewhere. So anyway, once that decision was made, I quit the main job and then the contract kept coming in. We got asked to hire more people and then we built a company from that. 

And then with profit, yes, it's a business. With the profit, there's two choices. You can just keep it, and there's no fun in that. So with the profit, we found other ventures. So we've been trying to either build technology that we can use ourselves to get more contracts on published games. Recently we just published, I think a few weeks ago, Micro Mage, say an Umbra NES game that's now available on PS4 and PS5. So yeah, that's basically it. And so we've been building this thing for three to four years now. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So quite some time. You started in 2020? 

Robin Lavallée: 2020 would be around when the company was funded, but it was more like just contract based. 2021 is when we got more serious. And then things ramped up from there and grew up quickly. 

Lizzie Mintus: And how did you meet your co-founder? Was this someone you had worked with in the past? 

Robin Lavallée: Oh, it was a friend. Yeah, we had talked back in the days on the internet really chat, IRC. I guess that's like discord before Discord was something. And so we had interests in Super Nintendo games and programming. And from there, we found more people. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's awesome. That's a good story. And you started this company, I think this is the best part, while you were traveling the world. So were you in like a sprinter van on a hot spot? Tell me more about that.

Robin Lavallée: I mean, yeah. So, I have a family. I have kids and we had this dream of traveling the world. Of course, it's expensive. And then, we ended up preparing for that trip just before the pandemic happened. So we ended up starting the travel, Airbnb-ing through the United States at the beginning. And then once the pandemic calmed down and the borders were open again for a few countries, we decided to travel again. But by this time, the company had grown. And since we're a remote only company, it kind of made sense. It was still possible. 

Time zone didn't make it hard. We were in Europe at some point, in New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, everywhere. And sometimes, say New Zealand, for example, I'm an early bird. So I would just wake up around 4 or 5 AM and I'd have my meetings there, which is perfect because from 4 to 5, to 9 or 10AM, you're about the most of the U. S. time and European time you can match them. And then I'm free after that. 

When there's a 12 hour difference, it's impossible, right? So what I end up doing is that it forces me to focus on the long term value of the company instead. Because all the operational stuff would happen while I sleep. I'd wake up and then, you're full of emails and full of Slack messages that you have not responded to. So obviously things just move on. And while you're working, nobody's there. And so now it's become kind of quiet. So it really forces you to think about working in a synchronous way and how to delegate work.

So sometimes I feel I was actually good. I also met people during my travels. You know, I was in Japan for example. So we met a video game developer there. I was in Italy. I met with someone from open source software. So we tried to make it work- family, schooling, and business all mixed up together, which is both great and bad.

 Lizzie Mintus: Great. I mean, it's hard, but that's amazing. You're living my dream. So I'll pick your brain. I'll look for it later. 

What was the state of emulation technology when you started and how are you seeing it evolve? 

Robin Lavallée: That's a good question. There's like the technological aspect of it. There's the political aspect. There's the business aspect. Technology wise, I think it's just evolving linearly. I was asked recently, what's a retro console? What's a retro game? What's a classic game? 

And I didn't have a good answer back then. Now I think I do. It's basically one generation away, I think. So like about 20 years or 10 years, in terms of people, I mean. It's whatever you have not played when you were a kid, I guess, or couldn't play. So I guess the version is now, PS3 is retro. PS4 will become retro maybe in five, 10 years. It's kind of weird because games are still coming out there. So I guess emulation gets easier and harder at the same time.

Those old NES games, for example, are small, kind of easy to emulate. PS3 might be harder to emulate. But at the same time, it's more streamlined. There's like strange stuff going on in the hardware. Things are a bit more streamlined. Without going too technical, like it has a GPU, it has a CPU. There's a way to understand, for example, the game access save data. Like, you know, it will tell the operating system, Ah, I need to save a game. Well, when you're on PS1, it's not really like that. It's just a game, just access the same data, just use it. So now you have to figure it out.

And for the rest, I mean, what we've pushed is console emulation. And unfortunately, a lot of the business side there is a bit less known because most consoles have NDAs. So if you want to be a developer for the Switch or PlayStation or XBox, you need to sign an account with them and then all the software they have to use, you can't really talk about it. So a lot of work is being done by open source emulation on those proprietary consoles, but then that work is not being pushed back to the open source community because you just can't. It's full of them. 

Lizzie Mintus: I hadn't thought about that aspect of the business. You talked about these source code adventures where people cannot end up accessing it. Do you think that people will set themselves up in a different way, so when you are doing a PS4 game, when it's retro, it will be easier to acquire the source code? Or do you think there are still all these different challenges that occur? 

Robin Lavallée: I think the challenge will be different because now we have online features and DLCs and online accounts. So your next game, your old Zelda 1 game will play forever. Well, it would be emulated or if you take care of your cartridge and stuff, have a nest behind the store here, but it still runs. It's there. There's no online feature there. Your Fortnite game will probably be totally different, right? You can emulate it, but it depends on the community, the maps, the DLC, the season pass or whatever they're doing. So that's harder. Now, what do you do with that? 

Lizzie Mintus: What do you do? 

Robin Lavallée: Yeah, one solution is, just cut it. Just remove all the multiplayer stuff. But if your game is online only, well, okay. You missed that. The solution is to emulate the multiplayer networking? Yes. It's very expensive, very costly. There's all kinds of certification issues. So the answer, unfortunately, right now is to just remove it. 

Is it going to be easy? Are people getting source code? I think things are a bit more streamlined. I mentioned the political aspect. Older games also have an issue of figuring out who owns the IPs. It's sometimes unknown, in the sense that you talk to those companies without naming them. Recent game did it. Yeah. They have good contracts. You've got good lawyers or whatever. Those old contracts are like, yeah, we were beginning our company. We didn't really do things the right way. There is a person that has some rights there and this other person here. So now if you want to do this game, we need to talk with them. And then no, I'm not sure. I think there's an updated version of the contract, but they actually caught on fire.

And this is a true story. That sounds like a lot of trouble. And that's not a tech problem. I just mentioned, it's just a communication problem. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. So if a company is creating a game today and really wants to be able to have their game saved so people can play it in whatever years when PS11 is out, or maybe they'll rename it, whatever it is. From a contractual perspective, do you have any advice on what to do and how to do it right?

Robin Lavallée: That's a good question. 

Lizzie Mintus: Talk with your lawyer. Yes. Just a disclosure. You are not a lawyer, I don't think. 

Robin Lavallée: I mean, I have my dream. If you want to talk about dreams, I can say my dream. My dream is books and music. There are books that are 2000 years old, right? Obviously they're not copyrighted anymore, but they still will sell. People can still republish them and make money. Why? Because people like the text is free, but the book itself, like no commentary around the book, let's say the Bible, whatever, like any of those books can still be reprint. No problem. That's cool because text is text, right? You just write the text and that's it. 

Music, same thing. You know, when you listen to music, you can put it in a different format. Video games have this, I mentioned the form factor. They require you to have the console to play it. They require you to have the TV. Like I have some games here I own, Shadow Arts 2 on the PS2. It's the real game there. If I want to play it, I need to get my PS2 out. All right, so I need to get my PS2 out. Now I need an HDMI adapter. I need to set this up, and I need to find my memory card, and the thing is set up properly, and this is bad. 

Lizzie Mintus: Or a big project for you.

Robin Lavallée: It's a big project, but for me, it's fine. But I mean, for the masses, it's become annoying. What if instead you could go Netflix or Switch and just say, well, you can buy this game for 10? Like, all right, that sounds better. I'm going to do this. It's just more convenient. 

So I feel like there is a mismatch between, talking about a dream, the laws were written like a hundred years ago, copyright for books, because after a hundred years, what do you do, you just copy the book and continue. And games have a lifespan of about 20 years, maybe 10 years. So I'm not saying that the game should lose their copyrights, but maybe there should be a way for this game to be accessible again and just let people do it.

If the game is really cool, they could still republish it and they would still own that new copy and people can copy it. But the old one would be like, all right. Do whatever you want and put it back. That's the dream. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and everybody that creates games really creates them because they love them and they want it to be shared with the world. And it's obviously so devastating if you lose that ability. So I think that makes sense. 

Tell me about the first project that you ever worked on. So you were contracting with your co-founder or it was just you? 

Robin Lavallée: We're contracting with my co-founder. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. 

Robin Lavallée: I mean, I can't really talk about the games we did in theirs.

Lizzie Mintus: We don't really need to give specifics, but I guess in evolution, right, since you started, what are some things that you've really learned on how to, I don't know, streamline processes? And I'm not sure what you can say versus not say or describe. 

Robin Lavallée: Yeah. I think what we can say is, having a good tool is important. We release about three games a month with them right now, which is when you think about it, doing three games a month, like we release them, we are not building the game, right? The games were already done 20 years ago. So, but still the facts are that we're porting three games a month. More or less. 

In order to do this, you have to do things a bit differently. So yeah, good tools, good communication, try to do emulation at scale. We have a neutral test system. We have dev kits that whenever engineers make changes to the code, it will run all those tests and then take screenshots of like 100 games and compare the screenshots against a reference screenshot. So if you're fixing something in one of the games and then it breaks another game, then you get alerted by this.

It's not a perfect system, but things like that- so that's the thing we learn. We also learn, again, non-technical problems, lots of assets need to be removed from the game sometime, unfortunately. Like, red crosses, they're protected. You can't show the red cross anymore. A lot of old games have a bunch of red crosses inside of them, so we changed those health packs.

Lizzie Mintus: Oh! 

Robin Lavallée: So we had to remove them. If you play Twisted Metal, for example, there's a Hollywood sign. Now it says Los Angeles. Why? I don't know. Somebody said we can't show Hollywood as part of the movie. Things like that. 

So we found a texture with a face of someone inside of it. We don't have the contracts anymore. And the publisher doesn't have any more. And they're like, well, It's this original game, like, the face of the person inside that picture there, were they allowed to do it? We don't know. So, can you remove it? I know it goes against the purist's interest of preserving video games, but it's part of the commercial aspect of it.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. And then, I mean, even if I watch TV shows or movies from 20 years ago, I cringe because the things that were socially acceptable to say and do then, are so not okay today. So, are there, like you talked about the red cross. 

Robin Lavallée: Oh, yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: How do you deal with making a game, like you said, balancing it being true for the players who want to play the original thing with being appropriate to release today? 

Robin Lavallée: Yes, it's just a publisher call right now. So it's whatever they say. We had one game where it was full of pentagram and we have to replace them with, I don't know, I think triangle or square or things like that. Sometimes it's just a text. They might be saying things, like you said, you're reading this, you're like, whoa, I don't think that's going to fly now.

Lizzie Mintus: My kids books from the nineties. I'm like, I don't think I want to read this book to you anymore. 

Robin Lavallée: So I think it depends. Like we're doing some Japanese game right now, an untranslated one. So some things are cultural specific. I think it's the same time as a translator when they translate books. Sometimes it's just like language, but sometimes there's a cultural aspect that doesn't really match or doesn't make sense for the reader. Like, okay, now I need to change this thing or explain it better. So it's hard. I think translators have to take some opinions when you translate things.

Lizzie Mintus: So, I mean, you were doing the actual port and the emulation of the game, but there's somebody else that's making the call on what should and should not be in the game. And they're telling you. You're not making that decision. 

Robin Lavallée: Right now, no. You mentioned, mostly a technological company, think of it like the Unreal engine, but you need to have game development, but for your mission. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. Yeah, that makes sense.

So I want to know more about your entrepreneurial journey because starting a company is not sunshines and rainbows.

Robin Lavallée: No, it's not all the time. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, when I started my company, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna. I'm going to have flexibility. I'm going to have a kid. And no. I do have flexibility, but I have flexibility to work a lot and pick when I'm working a lot and not working. So that's a little different, but what are some of the most impactful lessons that you have learned since you started? 

Robin Lavallée: Your role changes. So when we were two, it's basically two guys in the garage and you just get stuff done. When you're five, okay, you're still five guys in the garage. But it works. When you're ten, no, it doesn't work anymore. Not this time. Start having distinct roles and ideas. So now you need to change your role a bit. All right. It's not too bad, right? You just like, I'm going to make two teams and like a fewer space ability here and there and that's it. All right. It works. 

When you're 20, that doesn't work anymore. Again. So you're like, well, I want my company to be efficient. How do I make sure things are fine? How do I leave enough space for people to succeed? How do I set expectations? And I know I fail a lot. I don't know a lot. Do we hire fast? Do we hire slowly? Do we take a risk? The answer is yes. So there's a little sense. 

The other lesson is time management. It's easy to become passionate and it's fun when it's your company, right? So you can work 60 hours a week, 80 hours, 100 hours. And if it's fun, sure. But there's a limit of where it becomes unproductive, where you're working on the wrong thing, for example. Maybe one thing you're working on, I don't know, like I'm just managing my email for five hours. Well, was that useful? Did I get things done? Should I maybe hire someone to do this for me instead? And maybe I could think about meeting people for business instead, which would give more value to the company. So that's the thing I had to learn. 

I read a bunch of books about strategy, time management, and even about being passionate and depressed sometimes because you're building things. You succeed and you're like, now what? 

So right now, I think we have played more than 90 games in less than three years. Somebody said, that's cool. But you know, when you think about it, you're like, well, next year I'm going to do 120 and then 150. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's the entrepreneur in you. Yes, this is good. But now what's my next step? 

Robin Lavallée: Like, what's the next challenge? We could do this. We could do that. And now that's scary, because you have to make decisions. You can't just say, well, I'm going to try a, B, C, D, because you're going to fail again. So you have to say, well, I'm going to try B. But maybe B is the wrong answer. Maybe you should try C. But you don't know until you try B.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, existential dread there. Am I making the right decision? Especially as you grow, right? So it's hard. Yes, I can resonate a lot with what you're saying. 

What do you think went right for you? Was starting in the pandemic a big advantage for you because people were more interested in games? Because, I mean, business is a skill mixed with right place right time there's a lot of different factors.

Robin Lavallée: Yeah. What went right was getting in contact with the few key people, like getting the first, right contract. The next thing is, I have some recruiting experience, some hiring experience, but we were able to find very specialized people in emulation. And I don't think bigger companies would be able to do that. And I think , like I said, Ubisoft would not be hiring the people we hire because they would not fit any exact model they're looking for.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Robin Lavallée: But we knew what to look for. So we're like, okay, let's try this. Look, fail. Let's try that. Okay, success. All right. And yeah, we hired some people that did not work. We hired some people that did work, obviously more the second. And I felt that went well. And also we were remote only. So again, it's a trade off, right? Remote only? Fine, you can hire people from anywhere. 

Now, it also means that the people you hire from anywhere can work anywhere, can leave you. Also means that it's hard to have a sense of camaraderie. There's nobody. You're alone. After this call, the screen disappears, and you're back to yourself. And when you have someone next to you, it's not like you want to manage them, but you see them working on something, right? You're working on your thing. They're playing a game or just doing some things. Some explosion happened on the screen. I don't know. You look around like, Oh, this is cool. What's going on here? You just chat a little bit. 

There's a lot of value from those little things. There's a lot of value in being alone and you'll be able to focus on your thing. So it's like, I wish we could do both, like being on remote and then it's in an office somewhere and stay there like a week and go back out remote.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I mean, they say the same thing. There's so much value in meeting people in person, but it's hard and it's expensive. And I think maybe also an afterthought, like, Hey, I'm going to hire the best people in the best locations. And then it's, Ah, we have people in 11 countries coming together. It's a massive expense, right?

It's really different and challenging. But we're remote too. And we did a company offsite and we had fun and we did a cooking class together. And it was awesome. It was amazing to see people in person, but I think that's a big trade off too. Do you hire the right person within the vicinity of where you live or where your office is? Because that's a very different question. 

Robin Lavallée: No, right now, we have none. But we have a bunch of people in Europe right now. So they're together. So at least they don't feel lonely. They're not alone there. So when the rest of the team is sleeping, they can still work together.

But that's still hard because that means that you expect them to be on the same project, but maybe they won't be on the same project, for so many reasons. So now you get multiple access to people, the project, time zone. 

Lizzie Mintus: So I think this is something people don't really care about. And when I started my business, I talked about her on my podcast before, but my friend Julie has this company called Curiosity Based. And it's about getting curious on the way you give and receive respect, because that's very different per person. And that's very different also per country. Like countries have different norms on what's respectful in some countries. It's very respectful to be passive. 

I live in Seattle. Everyone is so passive aggressive. And that's polite. And to me, I'm not like this. I like Eastern European culture better in this way, just because they're like, Hey, here's what's going on. But for them, right, that is polite. It's polite to say, I am having this problem. Or when you say, how's your day going? My day is horrible and here's why.

But in America, they're just going to tell you- good, right? This is what's polite. So I think it can be a big challenge because maybe people are feeling frustrated or not understanding each other, but they're both trying to be polite in the way that is polite for them.

Robin Lavallée: That is true. I don't think we have had that issue that much, but there's always the risk of people, like we're engineers, we are a lot of introverts in the company. People like to write in text and email. Sometimes, I always tell people, if they have a big subject to talk about, you should do it in person because no matter what you write, even if it's nice, it's going to be misinterpreted. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Robin Lavallée: I mean, you can still write a document. Write a document, share it with the person, and have the meeting with them. At least now, you can read and talk and you realize those on site are very good for that too. 

There's a human behind the Slack avatar, the Discord name. It's not just like a piece of text and it's actually someone that has feelings and passion and fears and everything. So it's nice to meet those people. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. No, it's amazing. See how tall they are. That's always shocking. 

Robin Lavallée: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: But you're, it seems like you're hiring the most niche people. So you really need to find niche people and they're not all in one area.

Robin Lavallée: Yeah, so far. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So how have you felt like you're able to build camaraderie? in a remote environment. Do you have any tips or tricks on how to?

Robin Lavallée: Yeah, be transparent. Like I said, we've not been that good at this, but sometimes we, because we've been too busy, try a Friday and play a game together. Find something again. The reason why we fail, I feel like it's an excuse, time zone makes it hard. Like everybody on Friday at 11:00 AM- well, okay, now it's 8:00 AM on the west coast. It's almost dinnertime in Europe. You have to change the time, all the time. So that one trick to do on site and know they're expensive, but if you think about it, normal companies would have office expenses, right?

They need to buy furniture and rent. And so take that money, and if you're afraid of the cost, put that money in a spreadsheet, see how much it would have cost you. Well, that's your budget for your onsite now. So maybe that's one way to see it. 

And yes, on-sites are hard to plan, like travels and hotels, and people are coming from everywhere. And planes will be late, and someone will arrive one day later, and they will feel like they missed out on the big game you just mentioned. Your cooking class. Oh, I didn't go to cooking class, it sucks. Well, you know, do your best. Haha. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's good advice, right? Things are always going to go wrong. I like what you said about your breaking points too, and how you have to change how you think about the company and how the company is structured one to two, five, 10, 20. 

What are you hoping for? Are you hoping to double down on your technology and then be able to have other people that are not you execute by using your technology, almost like a license? 

Robin Lavallée: Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: What's your strategy if you don't mind? 

Robin Lavallée: Yeah, well, no, I don't mind. I mean, if people will reach out because they heard of this and they're happy about it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Robin Lavallée: With love, if we can use the technology for our customers, and we can use it for ourselves, and we can also help other customers with their own technology, maybe there's a way for us to license the technology to others.

Now, is there a market for this? I don't know. But there's only one way to know. So, the only way to try is just to do it. Unless we do it, somebody else would do it at some point, you know? 

 Uber, the idea is simple. You just tell someone you want to go somewhere and then someone comes and you bring you there. There's nothing magic about this. It's just a taxi system, but faster. 

But someone had to build it. I think it's the best thing in the world. The point is, going back to the SDK, if we build a technology like this. Yes. I would love to make it easier to scale. Because I was mentioning like, we meet people in Japan and talk about games and can we get the rights to this game? And you negotiate with them. It takes you six months. 

I heard some games take three years because you need to build a relationship with them. That doesn't scale. Our company, we'll do a few hundred games if we do this, but there's thousands of games. And so why don't we let other people do it?

Maybe if we provide technology that they can reuse, so now everybody gets a piece of the pie and moves the technology forward. As long as we move things forward, there will be business. People will find a way to make money out of this, and that's fine. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. And it'll be something bigger than you too, right? That's kind of the goal. 

Robin Lavallée: Exactly. People will build things we didn't expect. Unity now is being used to do design, industrial design, and I saw back in the days, people were using Unreal Engine to do car simulators, like self-driving cars using Unreal. I don't think when they made the Unreal Tournament, they were thinking about self-driving cars. No, they were thinking about people doing deathmatch and shooting each other. But it came to that, so you can't know what people are going to build.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and if you put it out there, people will definitely love it and surprise you. 

I have a question too, and maybe it's an obvious thing, but I read on your website, there are 12,000 classic games available on PlayStation, 6,000 on Xbox, and 4,000 on Nintendo. Why does PlayStation win? 

Robin Lavallée: Why does PlayStation have more games? That's a good question. I don't know, actually. It might be because the Japanese market has so many games. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. I was wondering. Is it that there are just more games in general that have been developed for PlayStation, that's why? Or people who have a PlayStation are more nostalgic for old games, or what is this correlation?

Robin Lavallée: I think this is just the amount of total games available. I think there's just more games on PS1, PS2. PlayStation was very popular. Nintendo is popular too, but yeah, slightly less, I think. 

I feel like Nintendo has Zelda and Mario. They're very great games. And they sold in the 30 millions, but there's not like a hundred of them. Well, it's getting there.

But I don't actually know. We have to check again. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah I'm interested in general. 

I also like to highlight on the podcast, there's ups and downs of business, like we talked about sometimes very intentional, sometimes not. But nobody gets where they are without a lot of help from mentors, from books, but really just from other people.

You have so many questions when you start your business, and it's, how do I open a business? And then it just continues and continues. But is there anyone that you can really think about that has helped you a ton or clarified questions for you? Do you have a go to person if it's a mentor or a coach, or somebody that's really formal or just someone that's always there to guide you?

Robin Lavallée: Right. I don't have a coach, but there's a lot of people I reach out to ask for guidance. There was an old manager. So I work at Twitch Interactive. And then they were like VP there. And sometimes I just had a call with them and say, Hey, what do I do with this situation? What do you think ? 

And sometimes you really have the answer, by the way. You already know what to do, but you just need someone to actually validate. But you don't tell them your answer. You just talk about the problem and then they come up and it's like, alright, this is the same thing as I was thinking. So sometimes it's a bit of self-confidence. Like, okay, okay, let's do this. I got it. 

There were people from Ubisoft when I started. It was great in learning how to do video games and to show me how to be a good leader. 

When you lead a team, you're leading a football team, let's say. All right. So you got your good, you're very great players that you focus your time on them. You also got your players that are not so good. Then you need to focus some time on them to have them grow. Maybe they're junior. Maybe they just changed team. So they need to figure that out. 

And then there's your average players and sometimes you forget them, because they're just doing fine. You spend time on the bottom and top. And I think that's wrong. You need to spend time there too, because those are maybe your future growth. But it's easy to forget them because your two extremes are taking so much of your time. So I felt like I learned from that, just watching my boss there.

There was a time when I became a manager. I went back to being a contributor and I had this micro manager at some point. And when you do that, first you learn a lot. And two, you don't learn what not to do. And also, I would actually recommend people, if they want to stay on the non manager track, maybe just become a manager for a little while and come back after. Because now you know exactly what your manager expects from you and what do you need? Like, why is he asking about this document? Well, you know what? Maybe he's in a meeting to promote you and you just need some information about this. 

So he's not just nagging you actually, like just provide him with information and do it today. Because you're getting a promotion next month. But if you haven't been my manager, you won't understand those things going on. It requires a bit of perspective. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's true. When you interview candidates, right? You become a hiring manager and you interview hundreds of candidates. And then you get how the interview process works. And then if you interview, you're like, Oh, this is why they're asking me that. This is what they're trying to get at.

Robin Lavallée: Yep, yep, yep. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's good advice. It's always good to be on both sides of the fence. 

Robin Lavallée: Yeah. As for books, I feel like there's a lot of self guidance books. There's all kinds of leadership books. I feel like most of them, my only advice would be don't read them all. Just read the beginning sometimes, like the first 30 or 50 pages may be enough just to get the gist of it. And if you don't fully understand it, sure. Keep going on. But usually we'll just go on by example there. So just go to the next book. 

Lizzie Mintus: My advice for that is Audible at 1.5x. Yeah, that's a strategy. 

I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, implicitconversions.com. The last question, from your perspective, what do you think the future of video game hardware is?

Robin Lavallée: That's a good question. I don't know. Well, I'm in a niche market, right? Recently this analog 3D that came out. Basically they are redoing Nintendo 64 using hardware. So that is coming up with hardware emulation of old titles. 

Another one I saw is from Game Boy, also coming out. This is like a new market for Game Boy games. It's a new market for NES games. There's probably going to be a PS6. I have absolutely no data about the PS6. Maybe, it will allow people to program their own hardware. So maybe there will become a case where you have an FPGA inside the PlayStation 6, and you can use that FPGA to customize an emulator for your PS3. And now you do hardware emulation using software. 

I know some people, maybe five years ago, would say that the future is cloud gaming. Well, I don't think so. Like Stadia- Stadia was a good experiment, but it did not work. I think it was too expensive for them to keep up. And also there's all the latency issues. 

The future of gaming is a lot of politics. As I mentioned, I got those copyrights and there might be some legal things going on there. That might actually influence what's available. 

I could go on. You know, there are all the microtransaction things going on. I feel like a lot of games have become almost like gambling games, where it's not a game anymore. The game is just like a side effect of the micro cycle there. But there's still an awesome game coming out. So, I don't know. I play all games, although I haven't played PS4, PS5 games. I'm still a PS3 hater. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. You'll have to do that maybe over your holiday break. I'll be curious. 

Robin Lavallée: Yep. Well, I'd have to emulate them first, then I can play them. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's true. That is necessary. 

We've been talking to Robin Lavallée, CEO and co founder of Implicit Conversions. Robin, where can people go to partner with you, to emulate their game, or learn more about you or work for you? 

Robin Lavallée: Yes, there are two ways. They can go on the website and then just click on the syrup engine because we're Canadian, so we love maple syrup. So that's why. Then you can find forms to reach us out. We also have a Discord. I don't have the link here, but look for Implicit Conversion Discord. You can talk about the mission game, ritual games, and favorite features, and chat there. A little community is available as well. And yeah, you can also reach us through email. We read them all for real. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I'll link it in the podcast. Thank you. 

Robin Lavallée: Thank you, Lizzie.

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.