Hello friends, welcome to a bonus episode of the Noclip podcast. It's not a crew cast, it's just little old me, the Irish boy, joined by, how do we introduce Mike Drucker?
A writer, producer, I mean, writer for television, but now a bona fide writer of books as well.
Mike, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me, I'm really excited.
ahead is a book tour um you know this is a sorry the i should name the book it's uh it's right here a good game no rematch uh a life sorry a life made of video games by mike drucker um is a book tour as glamorous if you're doing it in your house over zoom um it's not glamorous even in person even in person even in person you're like okay guys i'm gonna be at barnes and noble at five Five o 'clock.
Please show up. Please show.
Yeah. By the way, if anyone's listening to this, I have an event at Barnes and Noble April 9th in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Please come out. Please come out.
I will sign your book.
If you can't get people to the Barnes and Noble in Brooklyn, you might.
there was uh we have uh copperfields books here in petaluma and uh the one week um uh jerry hallywell uh posh spy no not posh but sorry ginger spice was doing her memoir and i really wanted to go in because i was like i don't know if this is the town i don't know if they're big into into spice world uh who knows but yes uh fair play yes i can see the closest one i have is the pax panel where you, and then you're not sure if anyone's going to turn up to it.
Um, but I guess that's, at least that's at a conference.
There is something uniquely humiliating about you just being in a, in a local bookshop waiting for people to come in.
Yeah. At the same time, like every author I've talked to has been like, Oh, these things are nightmares.
So don't worry about it.
If it's like, they're like, like they're like preemptively, like, don't worry about it.
If it just feels weird the whole time, which I can do.
So how do we know each other?
Because Because I feel like, you know, there's probably some common ground somewhere.
Usually, for me, a lot of stuff ends up being the giant bomb community or something like that.
But I feel like we're just, was it just Twitter?
Was it just you're a funny person on the internet, so I followed you?
You're a funny person on the internet who also does game shit.
And I'm like, yes, I will be a fan of this person for decades and like a sort of parasocial friend.
even though we've met in person like i think twice maybe at like a jeff keely thing or something or yeah i think like kind of funny events we met up once yes yes um uh yeah no i think we met on twitter you know you you're doing you were doing great games work and i was making jokes perfect and all that time you were um writing on uh for tv right yeah so how's that before we get into the game stuff like what what are you predominantly doing explain to the good folks uh who listen to do our podcast sort of what you're the shows you worked on the sort of process the process of that they love process
they love learning how shit's made you know what i mean um well most of the shows that i've worked on are late night shows i've worked on uh literally late night i've worked on the tonight show i've worked on um uh full frontal with samantha b i worked on well adam ruins everything wasn't a late night show but i worked on various shows that was great show i absolutely love that that was a super fun show and other stuff like i wrote on mystery science theater 3000, um, which was super fun.
That one, that process is super fun.
That the process of that is they, um, you, I was in the later season.
So like it was a zoom room, but so the night before we would get sent the clip that they wanted us to watch that day.
And it's in like 10 minute segments.
So each day of writing would be a 10 minute segment.
Oh, wow. And so I would wake up early in the morning and watch this clip and like scribble jokes out.
And then we'd go to the zoom room and it's literally us watching the clip and then someone going hey can we stop and then pitching jokes and other people are like it's very collaborative so someone will be like what about this and someone's like oh and what if after that we you know we have this joke it was super fun and everyone was super nice it's also nice that they in the corner of the clip they actually have a time code uh that tells you how much space there is in that because usually you're giving a riff in a moment of silence when someone's not talking yeah and so it'll actually have the literal
amount amount of time you have in the corner of the screen like a shot clock yeah exactly that's great that is amazing oh my god also that's somebody's job to do that that's probably super annoying yeah yeah i'm certain of it i'm certain because it's not like it's not like there's it's not like uh when you see like rushes from a film and there's like just an ongoing timer right like the timer comes and disappears based on like when there's a moment you can insert jokes so like so you and you know then okay i've got like five seconds to basically get a punchline in here or something exactly yeah
okay or on the other hand you'll have like oh there's like literally a minute and a half of silence is there a longer bit we could do here right yeah yeah fill it in oh my god so you get 10 minutes that's that must be a weird process that like are you getting random 10 minutes or do you start with the first 10 minutes first 10 minutes okay and then you keep going yeah piece by piece that's amazing okay and so the process of doing one episode would be like a couple of weeks basically sort of slow yeah like two or three weeks depending on the length other thing man that is wild that reminds me of one
of my favorite podcasts during the uh the the covet times the dark covet times was that the irish men had you heard about no no no no it was uh i forget the guy's name i've followed him for years but he's he's involved with secret base you know s sp nation they sort of did the rebrand but on his side on the side during covet he decided to review the irishman the movie which is like three hours and 20 minutes or something thing yeah one minute at a time so he had to make like it took he finished it like two months ago wow it took like because he because he'd get sick of doing it not do it for six
months and then come back and then do you know minute by minute but he watched the entire i have not watched the irishman i have only heard a review of it in minute long chunks over the course of four years so it sounds like a kind of similar process were you a big mystery science theater fan growing up do you have any favorite episodes favorite movies from it I mean there's always uh there's Santa Claus uh conquers the Martians because I'm also a big Christmas person so that's probably the one I've seen the most just because I put it on every year at Christmas time so that's probably my favorite
but I was a massive fan as a kid I even was subscribed to the newsletter that I still have some copies of um I physical newsletter they said they had a physical newsletter that you could get um and I like built you know before I knew that you know fan art was a thing like I built like little home model robots versions of the robots out of like loose junk um yeah i loved it hell yeah well your childhood comes up a lot yeah in this book um and the thing about like book book interviews and book tours especially when you know you're going to do a few of them is like you're going to run out of like
just you're just spoiling your own work right yeah you're just you're just talking about the funny things that happen in the book and it's like well why would would i read the book then if he's told me all the best parts so instead um also i read this chaotically i read it in like just a frenzied order of what i wanted to read about that day so like i was like oh i'll just read the street fighter uh chapter i'll read the the minecraft chapter was an easy read i'll bounce around here and probably some of this probably goes down to the fact that i um and this is a constant problem on this podcast
i did not grow up playing nintendo because I grew up in Ireland so I was playing Commodore Amiga games yeah um so uh the a lot of the NES Game Boy stuff I'm like you know that's that's for that's for the cool Americans who grew up on that shit not not poor old me um so I bounced around a lot on this and so what I did is what we're doing is I've made the Mike Drucker nostalgia bowl okay yeah I've created a bracket which basically takes largely these are games that have a chapter about them in some respect and we're gonna we're gonna just go tit for tat we're gonna go single elimination uh 16 of them
all the way down to one and we'll see which is your favorite this is going to be like sophie's choice though for your yeah this is gonna be tough this is gonna be tough apologies and then yeah you can tell us a little bit about some of your um stuff that's in the book or not uh and how you sort of uh how you get down to these difficult decisions love it anything you're worried about in particular like anything you think that's going to be probably one of the winners, maybe any, any aspect, any console, any game?
I don't actually know because I feel like whenever I try to come up with my favorite game, it's sort of like what I'm in the mood for at the moment.
Okay. So I'll be like Mario 64 and then I'll be like Planescape Torment.
You know, it's kind of like where I am mentally is where my favorite game is.
Excellent. Are you a big Disco Elysium fan?
I love Disco Elysium.
Yeah. Excellent. Okay.
Yeah. Just speaking of Planescape Torment.
yeah yeah actually before we do it i forgot our battle pass holders who are part of our patreon who help us uh fund all our work um mike as is tradition i have sent you a list of names uh these are all the people who get shout outs because they give us an atrocious amount of money every single month so that we can uh pour words of wisdom and jokes into their ears um so hey look best of luck right there's a lot of europeans in here so uh here are our battle pass holders as as written out by uh by mike all right here we go anthony thomas nico posateri isami ferrero ferrario penelope hayes thank
you penelope hayes senator armstrong god bless you senator armstrong emin slattery sounds like a businessman uh or business well harry flanagan uh joosh arno richard matheson matherson if it was richard matheson you'd be be writing some great horror novels matt pierce pearson james brown love your music mark rojas uh tucker morgan david mcgary sven houster pez great dispenser you int nate tim robinson oh my god such a fan of you uh forest pruitt jonathan cremin love that name jonathan cremin eric hamilton schneider christoph fett fett we as this one needs a little bit of english on it you got
gotta give it a bit of gusto this next one this next one yes oh cameron ladd beautiful thank you of course uh zachary snader which sounds like zach snyder's just trying to sneak in without revealing who who he is alex goushey george uh zerkotis jacob godserve entheogen tohir tilly yave nice and rice or rice and ricin is that a type of poison i think right yeah i think yeah also i think you might have said george's name more accurate than i ever had i've never noticed the art that's in there man george let me know if i'm if i'm fucking up on that one it's probably me fucking it up thank you mike
you're a gentleman really appreciate it okay let's get into the bracket dude um we're starting off with a big one okay um our first uh bracket choose between the nintendo entertainment system and the game boy oh that is actually a rough tough choice for me um i'm gonna say because the first chapter of the book is about me getting the nintendo at age three and how it just changed my life from there and how i've how and there's a lot i embarrassed myself a lot more with the nes you see in the book um but the game boy is something because i grew up in florida we were always doing road trips like
we we rarely flew anywhere even when we drive to see my mom's family in chicago we would drive oh my god really jesus what is that that like 20 hours or something something like that yeah i mean even like going to disney world from where we lived it was like five hours okay right um jeez so that like that was like glued to me for for most of my childhood and that system lasted so long that you know you go from like tetris in 89 to what pokemon in 97 or something or 98 so there's just so much for that system that i have to go with game boy game boy gets it okay favorite nes games just while While
we're on NES. Mega Man 2.
I would say Super Mario 1.
And Super Mario 2. I like Super Mario 3.
But I feel like everyone loves Super Mario 3.
Which somehow makes me love it less.
The NES version of Tetris.
And... I'm missing something.
That I'm really trying to think of.
Mule. Have you ever played Mule?
M -U -L -E. Like drug mule.
It's almost like an acronym.
and it's a slightly worse version of a good strategy game that was better on pcs but it's actually like a fascinating old strategy game to play the art for this is incredibly interesting looking yeah it's like a fucking like a weird robot donkey or something what is what am i looking at yeah it's it's not the best version of it but it's the first version that i played um and it's like honestly if you if you released it today you could be like this is like a five dollar indie game this is like a fun indie game it's uh it's yeah a game based on basically an exercise in supply and demand economics
is that right yeah yeah man designed by danielle bunton berry um you don't often get like into like single female designers in like the late 80s oh my god i think you get like her and roberta williams right yeah that's it yeah that's it man that's wild okay i have to look into she man she passed away a long time ago 1998 she died of lung cancer that what a what a she's got a rush got a run of some interesting games here with ea as well yeah dude i got some you're giving me work here this is great and this next one is going to be a killer for me uh it comes up in one of the early chapters i was uh
where you're it sounds like one One of your your IT teacher was kind of just coming in and getting their paycheck and didn't really give a shit what you did.
Yeah. So we're putting them it's we're going back to 1999 Quake three versus Unreal Tournament.
You know, that's a great question, too, because, yeah, like you said, there's a chapter in my book where I talk about how I wanted to break into the video game industry and took programming classes, but was terrible at it.
But my school had just received funding for new computers.
So we had new PCs and nobody who was really watching us.
And so we did play both Unreal Tournament and Quake 3.
I would say Quake 3 just because it seemed like – and the only reason I'm going with that is it seemed like more people in the class liked it.
And so it was a bigger – it had a bigger emotional feel.
Like, it almost, like, got so big that it felt like watching, like, eSports or something where people are just losing their mind in the class.
And Unreal Tournament we liked, but I feel like it didn't have the same impact.
it's interesting you must have had good computers then as well because you needed like an open GL graphics card to get Quake 3 to run so that was you were they were they weren't uh they weren't skimping on your computers there well part of it was like they got funding for a program that also involved like multimedia design so the computers were like also made to run photoshop and you know back in the day photoshop but still right I went to QuakeCon for the first time last year and it was like going back in time to like my college days it was such a beautiful I'm going going back again this year
and like trying to get some buddies and and my wife and kid to come as well and maybe i'll just live at quake con for the rest of my life um all right quake three you're through you've uh you've made it through apologies to our friends at epic um these two i don't really don't really have much of a i'm trying to pair them up in interesting ways these two are are kind of from two different eras and also two different types of game bioshock and starcraft oh that's a great question um Um, Bioshock, I have a, like, is one of, I have like just a goofy short chapter in my book about, um, what was the other one
again? Starcraft. Starcraft. Starcraft. Yeah.
And Starcraft was like a big game in high school for me.
I write about my book and it was a game that actually got us into trouble for a reason you can find out in my book.
Um, Starcraft was so big in my school, like just hours and hours lost in it.
Like people playing multiplayer, like against each other.
And yeah, like my high school experience, like someone who looks like me should have had the crap beaten out of him every day in high school.
But really, it was like I went to like video game high school, like it's awesome.
Like we had an amazing basketball and football team and they would play, too.
Like there were no like if someone in my high school, if someone beat the shit out of you, usually it means that you had a personal beef with them.
It wasn't like you're a different clique than me.
And was that just because you had such like there were so many computers around or you had I .T.
classes or like why was it there was access to them?
I think there was access to them.
I also think that we weren't a super out like we had that funding for those computers, but we weren't a super rich school like it was a public school.
So I also think that there wasn't like a lot of like, you know, rich kids that are cheerleaders.
It was more just like this student is also a football player.
The student is also this.
um and i think just you know i think everyone just kind of liked video games enough that you know it was easier to be friends with someone who wanted to play super smash brothers than it was to not be friends with someone like if you wanted a four -player game going sometimes you had to grab who is whoever was available that's awesome he just had a good group good culture going on yeah man oh man so is starcraft winning then do you think or uh you know what i i think think like five years ago i would have said bioshock but i'm gonna go to starcraft now i feel like bioshock is sort of like dampened
in my mind a bit it's a lot of people it sounds like it's kind of turned into a little bit of a i don't know like there was one really good game and then people are kind of harsh on the second one and then a lot of people don't like infinite i like infinite but i get why people i get criticism against it you know i'm the same way yeah like i enjoyed it but it i get why people didn't like it yeah and it maybe has aged even worse perhaps as well okay we're stepping away from games for a little bit to talk about uh two jobs you've had oh i decided to pick uh late night as one of these and the other
one is the imagine games network ign you spent a year at ign yeah at the ripe age of 27 which i think was also the year i got my job at games bar maybe when i moved yeah i think no yeah i think i was 27 yeah um so yeah what's you know you only spent a year at ign um uh how does it stack up against uh your time writing for late night um well i will say that what i liked about ign was there was more goof off time and it was all video games so it's just all video games all the time which was great uh what year is this this was 2012 okay okay and then i only worked there for one year in 2012 and we
got to make uh this show with greg miller called up at noon which he he says is sort of the predecessor to kind of funny and i say he would have been fine no matter what it's definitely the way i feel like the show that catapulted him um in that sort of second stage career stuff because and it was so it was it was like there was so much of it as well was it how often was it was it it wasn't daily but it wasn't daily it was once a week but sometimes we'd break out segments and then like re -post post those.
Um, that said, uh, late night paid about six times more than IGN did.
You're kidding me. Oh no. I can't imagine that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Being a television writer pays more than writing for a video game website.
And I found that out more than once in my life.
Um, so I'm very grateful.
I'm very grateful for IGN, but I think like Like, getting to go to, like, the Emmys while getting paid good money.
Right. Is something I'm going to have to go with late night.
So, you know, my understanding of how writing works on those televisions is based on, like, 30 Rock.
Yeah. So, like, what's it – is it, you know, are you reacting super quickly?
Like, are you going in that morning writer's room and coming up with stuff?
How much is stuff that's written ahead of time or planned or segments that are done a couple of weeks early or something?
Yeah. Um, well for a show like late night or the tonight show or something like Colbert show or Jimmy Kimmel show, since you're making a show every day, you are really just like waking up, running to the news, writing up some pitches and you know, different shows have different needs.
Colbert is a little more political than Jimmy Fallon and Kimmel is sort of in the middle there.
And so, you know, you, first of all, you, you are writing for a person.
So when you're looking at these new stories and these pitches, you're not necessarily going like what is the best comedy i could do you're like okay what is someone something he would enjoy doing is his sense of humor and so you know you write up depending on the show three four or five pitches you send them in and then usually and these shows are now back in the office i would in the morning email my pitches early then i would go into work and then you know sort of wait 30 minutes to hear after their meetings about what was picked or what wasn't picked sometimes like literally sometimes you'll
send everything in then 11am there's a giant news story and you have to throw everything out and rewrite everything um so it can be very high pressure and it's not high pressure because people are being mean to you like i was never like belittled or anything but it is high pressure when it's like all right everybody we're all hands get in your seat we need you to keep writing thank you notes until we're done and that can feel high pressure in the moment it's also kind of silly because you're like freaking out in your head you're like I gotta go I gotta do this then you're like this is late night
television what am I doing like why am I getting mad at myself does it does it is it easier to do the longer you do it like when you get in the flow state of the of the presenter like is it tricky at the start where you're trying to find your feet or maybe do they like having ideas that are a little bit left of scent left of field I guess at the start um you know you do you do have a little trouble just because you're trying to make sure you have their voice down you know a lot of writing for, especially a comedian, is what do they think is funny?
You know, their specific sense of humor, what don't they think is funny?
What are topics they don't like?
You know, for example, Jimmy Fallon is not someone who really likes doing jokes about sex. Right.
It's just not his cup of tea.
And like there's one or two other sort of gross out type things that he doesn't love.
And so we just don't pitch on that.
But that's not something that there's no handbook they give you on day one.
It's just something where like, you know, someone takes you aside and they're like, Like, hey, man, I love that pitch, but he doesn't really like this.
Or like he's, you know, he doesn't like, you know, he doesn't like making fun of Mother's Day.
So like once someone pitched something and he's kind of like, I don't want to do that.
You know, that's not my, you know, thing.
And so that is that is a little tough.
But you do it so much and so often that part of the job is learning that.
And when I do it, I will literally like be gesturing as I'm writing, reading it out loud, loud almost doing not trying to do a voice accurate impression but almost trying to feel out how he physically deliver it on the stage and that helps me a lot um but it does take a lot of it takes a lot of practice do you get much of breaks like do they ever cycle you guys out like a bench no no but there is like a there's it's you know i would say it's a very hurry up and wait type world so like you know sometimes you might be like hey everybody you have one hour we all only five pitches right now right
but then after that you might have an hour and a half where you're waiting to hear if any of those pitches went so you might have an hour and a half to grab lunch or something now it's not like they're gonna say you're good for an hour and a half go wherever you want but you're more like i think i can run downstairs and grab some food and come back up it's like the writing version of you of being a paramedic or something it's like periods of boredom and period flashes of intensity yeah every day so i guess it suits certain people to some folks i guess that would be like just way too anxiety inducing
yeah do on a day -to -day basis and what's the competition like i'm sure especially you know when you especially when you're starting out you're you're trying to make a name for yourself within that writer's room like how how much of it is collaboration how much of it is competition it depends on the show's culture um some shows insist on everyone working together on a thing um like full frontal with samantha b B was a lot more collaborative.
It was a lot more like everyone added to something.
Um, I wouldn't call, uh, the tonight show and late night competitive, but it is a massive staff.
So Samantha B, the staff was eight people at tonight show.
It was 20 when I was there.
So just writers, just writers.
Right. Yeah. And so it's competitive in the sense that there is not enough space for everyone to get material on the show, but it's not competitive in the sense of, you know there's you know like how dare you or like you're cheating to get it on like it's not like you're there's no animosity because it's not like this person's your rival and it's not like someone's defeating you in combat if you don't get a joke on that's that's kind of the the up and the down of doing comedy is usually if something's not funny that's the reason it's not getting picked versus favoritism right yes it's the only
place in the world in which you know the quality of the work is somewhat connected to whether or not it gets in I guess but then there's that subjectivity I guess as well with where we're speaking the stuff as well but that's part of the figuring out the voice all right stepping back to our bracket here this is purely based on the fact that they sound somewhat like each other DDR and D &D oh man how did by the way how did that guy fuck himself up on the the ddr machine he said he like he flipped he like did he flip over the bar or something he it was almost like his back hit the bar so if you if you
can imagine a ddr machine with the pad and you know the big screen and then in the back there's a metal bar right behind the d -pad and it was almost like he tipped back he hit hit sort of the end of the bar with the middle of his back which kind of twisted his body around and then he kind of ragged all down um so he wasn't like seriously hurt but it was the type of fall that you like will see on tiktok or something where you're like that person is either fine or dead and he was just it sounded like he was just humiliated more than anything else yeah yeah um yeah in the book uh i talk about the first
time i came across ddr and how i fell in love with it and it really was the first time i think anyone in that arcade had seen ddr okay because this this was the not this was like i'd say late 90s before it was like i think like a couple years before rhythm games really broke out here and so it was like everyone coming to watch almost like an alien device being activated yeah i remember the first time i saw one of those like i remember the first time i saw a light gun machine yeah my the low the arcade by the coast in ireland where i grew up and being like that's it's a fucking gun.
You can't do that. Can I do that?
I can play that? I can shoot a gun?
That's fucking insane.
And then, yeah, DDR and obviously D &D is very different.
Does D &D appeal to you as a writer?
Like that type of aspect of it?
Yeah, definitely. Like for me, the most fun parts of D &D are the imagination parts.
Like I could give a shit about the math and how many squares an arrow can fly.
Like I'll play by the rules because i want everyone to have a good time but to me the fun part is me like coming up with a funny idea that may or may not work you know like the best dnd battles to me is when someone's like i flip a table and then i throw the other guy and you're like what let's see if it happens my most frustrating dnd games are when someone's like don't do that no no no no no no no use this spell use this spell because because that spell can't go five squares this spell can go five squares and i'm like listen stop it like let the spell stop five squares away and you know the sort
of sad trombone plays or yeah exactly um but i i'm gonna pick dnd for this just because i've probably played more dnd in my life and because i've been lucky enough to be in some groups with some truly great people who were super creative and super fun and super funny and um yeah in the book i write about my dnd group that i have with fellow employees from from nintendo and a guy from valve and it's so much fun when you have people who both understand games and also just commit to the bit like in a dnd game like the worst thing is when there's one person who's not committing and i don't mean committing
like showing up because there's always someone who's busy i mean committing like when they're like i don't know like i don't know i guess like going to the dungeon or something and you're like right come on man don't don't don't don't play this like it's monopoly right we had a we the first time i had ever played dnd was during covid you know similar kind of you know on zoom just a way to for us a bunch of us uh to connect and um will smith from testers or previously from tested was there and will was playing in his character in our in our session was basically a like fire wizard guy who just
every every problem we ran into his first suggestion and only suggestion was let's use fire so it was basically like this sort of um like a shot clock underneath us to be like we need to figure this out quick because if we don't in about two minutes he's gonna get impatient and fucking set somebody on fire or like so and half of the cool shit that happened to us happened because of him you know because he did something that just completely broke everything and then we had to yeah the like chaos element um in the party i'm trying to get my daughter into dnd we've started doing some some like small
little single sheet stuff she's only six years old you have any any suggest i'm not sure how many children you've played dnd with but any suggestions for for helping somebody you know or just a new person getting into it because i'm i'm having to dm as well which is also very difficult but i it's like as a parent you just have to do things sometimes step into a role so it's kind of like one of those situations well i i do the the listeners will be happy to hear i I do not play D &D with many children.
What if I did? What if I was like, yeah, I've got like a group of 30.
They're not mine. But, you know, we hang out, you know, it's basically the skateboarding scene in the Ninja Turtles movie.
It's our special time.
Yeah, we have a warehouse.
It's actually a gang.
You know, I would suggest, you know, you could either simplify the rules.
I know there's things like Happy Birthday Robot, which are like made for kids, you know, pen and paper games made for kids.
um there's also a lot of good storytelling games um so I might look at some of those indie storytelling games um because those are so rules light they're often like so focused on telling a story like there's one called uh oh captain my captain and what it is is it's and it's based on something called like uh I think it's like hail to the queen or something with the queen but it's this role -playing game where you have a bunch of pictures of different captains space captain sea captains whatever you choose one and then what you what the group does and it can be two people it can be six people is you
mix the rest of the deck and the deck has questions and the questions are open -ended questions that you have to answer as your character that you don't have an idea of yet until you're answering the question so you sort of flesh it out as you're going because you'll be like like the card will say something like you once lied to the captain about something extremely extremely important.
What was it? And why did you lie to him?
And so you're like, okay, I lied to him when I said that I had the keys to the cabin and the reason, you know what I mean?
And you start to actually like in the first few turns, you're like, am I just going to be answering random questions?
And then as you build, you're like, oh, you're like, well, this happened after this.
And because I said this earlier and you really build out a fun story over the course of like an hour, hour and a half.
Oh, that's great. Thanks.
Yeah. That's what I'm trying to like do do it in baby steps like that sort of mechanical aspects of the games i'm trying to introduce a little bit later she's really good at like creating stories like she listens to her music box and reads books all the time like that's all she does and she's like super into narrative so yeah that sounds that sounds like a great one cheers i should um yeah that's i'm getting i'm getting research for noclip and parenting tips from someone who has no children hey look you but But you had a great dad because we're going to talk about I this was maybe one of my favorite
anecdotes in the whole book.
And I won't spoil it here, but it was very similar to something that happened to me as a child.
I'm going to do Street Fighter two versus Mortal Kombat here.
And I don't know if I should say Mortal Kombat on the game boy, because that is the version that you are most familiar with, which I love that part of the book.
That was very, very funny.
um uh but yeah i guess yeah which which uh you know your dad came up clutch when you needed a copy of street fighter 2 sometime and my dad my mom was out of town one time and like my dad we never got any presents outside of christmas right similar yeah you know similar working class household we did you know we got takeout once a year on christmas eve and we got presents on christmas and me and my brother's birthdays were too close to christmas so we got like sort of for your for christmas on your birthday right you got robbed yeah he was december 19th that was was january 5th i think they did
it on purpose so they didn't have to fucking but fucking uh for some reason i don't know what i asked him about a years later but we were just a boy's weekend because mom was gone to dublin to see her mom or something and we were downtown having having uh like like tea cakes and tea in like a restaurant which we hardly ever did and then he was like you know what are you guys into at the moment we were talking about this game world Mortal Kombat 2 that just came out on Amiga and he just randomly got it for us and it was it's like never had we were fucking shocked that's amazing it was incredible
and I asked him about years later and I think he said something like maybe an extra pay packet came in or something every once in a while he said he worked as an insurance guy in this office and sometimes they got a little bit extra and he said maybe I did it then or whatever so it was like so random it never happened before or since yeah um uh but it was so reading about your your dad having a similar sort of crisis of conscious with the family money um to help you out um yeah it was was really wonderful um yeah heroic dad it was it was it was a it was a heroic dad saving moment it was definitely
a our relationship fixing moment and memory which are these two then i'll open up world of combat you can say the game boy version or you can go with like two or something if you want i'm gonna you know what i'm gonna go with the the game boy version of mortal kombat just because it's a bit funnier and because of the car trip thing i said before because yeah and the reason i bought it if uh is because because my family didn't have much money like when you were buying gifts with your christmas or birthday money you'd saved over the years you're kind of like oh fifty dollars well this is 19 it's
probably just as good for gameboy right um but yeah so i'm gonna go with mortal kombat gameboy one excellence the how many so how many characters in the game boy version of wild combat like six six so it's which on the original wild combat was also six right it was seven who did you miss uh the game boy version was missing johnny cage and i think the game gear version might have been missing kano oh funny okay no was of course yeah i had a friend i just we'd students used to stay with us you know like international students and get a bit of money and they'd stay in one in one of the rooms so i'd
stay i'd have to sleep with my brothers in my brother's room for like fucking six months a year but one of them brought a game gear one time and it was the first time i saw a fucking game gear and it like blew my mind and we had we had japanese girls come and stay with us as well at one stage and one of them had a thing which it took me like 15 years later to realize it was a game and watch oh yeah but she was like the donkey kong one i think yeah and she let me play that like that was the that was the shit it's weird how like technology we don't have those moments i think anymore we're like this mysterious
piece of tech that you've never heard of before it turns up like like the ddr machine you know yeah exactly yeah suddenly this i feel like we're missing out on those or maybe we're not do kids these days like i wonder if like you go to your friend's house and they have like a meta quest 3 that's gotta be yeah i'm sure that happens yeah yeah or even like i mean now it's eight years old but even like i remember in 2017 being seeing the switch for the first time being like right wait a minute what big boy games on a screen i can play moral combat one on this on the drive to chicago that's that's
way better i literally when the first week i got it i was going on like a second date with a woman and i brought it out did the kickstand and made us play king of fighters wow and now you're married no no i'm not that woman is not dating me anymore did you get a second date or a third date i did okay i did we actually dated for a little while after that nice okay hey it works kids you know sometimes women ignore red flags i am i had a similar god i totally forgot about this i had a similar situation where i was on a a date with somebody that then led did also went well led led to more dates where it
was um it was those fucking mood there was those old games where it was like a car it was like a child children's game with a car which i'd never heard of before and she told me about them and apparently they're really big is this ringing any bills for you at all no no no i'm trying to think what the fuck was he called it was like a cartoon car he was like squishy i'd like squishy wheels was it like like a purple looking car i think or something eyes and stuff you know i don't know i forget the name of this thing put it in the comments folks put me out of my misery but yeah yeah it was ended up
being a really powerful aphrodisiac which was a bit weird actually but hey worked out um we're down to the last two on this uh on this bracket and we're going to get down to the elimination for the rest of them at the wii and minecraft the minecraft chapter in this is is fantastic it's just it's just two pages of lists of things that you built in minecraft over the years yes yeah yeah and uh say minecraft and the we and the we chap the we chapter is fun because it involves working at saturday night live if you're listening i'm i'm very much trying to sell you the book as you listen to this podcast check
out the book you check out the book good game no rematch available now where's it available just we'll just plug it in the middle oh yeah it's It's available on Amazon, anywhere books are sold.
You can get it audio, digital, hardcover.
It's possible the UK edition might have been delayed a couple weeks.
But check it out. Pre -order it.
Pre -order it. Get it in there.
Anyway, so Minecraft. I'm going to actually go with the Wii on this one.
One, because just a matter of fact, I've spent a lot more time on the Wii than I've spent on Minecraft. i like minecraft a lot but i played it very early access and kind of got my fill of it so i kind of missed i sort of was already a little burnt out by it when people were discovering the the real magic inside of it that's fair with the wii though like i have so many good memories with it i know that looking back on it we kind of see the wii as this like weirdo quirky console that doesn't really count as a console or something but like looking back that was like a giant thing like i I went to
fancy parties where they had a Wii.
It was bizarre. Like, I would, like, in New York City, there would be, like, a loft party with famous people there.
And they would have, like, a big Nintendo Wii set up, like, with a projector against a wall.
So I'm going to have to go with the Wii because I think we've all forgotten that it was actually a giant cultural phenomenon.
I worked at a video game store when it was out and it was in, like, I'd worked in game stores for years before that, that but the people coming in to buy games also totally changed yeah and that was really cool you know suddenly we're seeing a lot more women a lot more girls a lot more kids a lot more older people yeah like like you know and those fucking do you remember those we fit mats yeah yeah they were like impossible to get for like a year like we'd have to we'd have people booked out like months in advance to get those those what were they playing at the wedding thing we sports at those
celebrity parties or was somebody cracking out red steel no it was it would actually have have been much funnier if it was like red steel yeah let's play mad world or something you know i don't know yeah it was it was always wii sports or then like later wii sports resort but like definitely that early it feels like that first year of the nintendo wii is when it was always at like parties i'm trying to find the uh the minecraft um uh chapter here with the book in front of me can you remember some of the things you made in minecraft uh a square shack a stack of square shacks all the classics basketball
court with no hoops yeah circles are hard circles are hard man circles you end up making very big things when they're circling yeah you don't have enough like yeah it's a problem man and our last one here um something old and something new i went with here uh but both uh very japanese final fantasy 7 against near automata oh uh if it was the final fantasy 7 remakes i would have said near but if it's the original final fantasy 7 i'm gonna have to go with final fantasy 7 because as i write in the book it gave me a very bad idea of what romance was yes i think the chapter is just named after what is the chapter
called again it's um uh miss red and erith gainsborough and it's about a teacher who looked exactly like spot on exactly like erith and how that was not good for me that was not good for a middle schooler maybe that's why i were cracking the switch out during dates you know That was the original sin, the seed of it.
Yeah. Okay, thank you.
So we're down to the quarterfinals.
This might be a little bit easier, a little bit tougher.
It's all down to you.
But it's definitely going to create some interesting matchups that sort of maybe thematically don't make much sense at all.
Yeah, it definitely does, actually, especially these first two.
The Game Boy versus Quake 3 Arena.
Game Boy. Game Boy.
That's fair. fair that seems that seems appropriate as much as i love quake 3 it's a top five game for me um it does seem a bit silly to pick it over there uh starcraft versus late night i'm gonna go with late night because uh late night paid infinitely more than starcraft okay fair enough i can see where this is going um dungeons and dragons versus mortal combat on the game boy oh that is tough uh i'm gonna give a slight edge to dungeons and dragons just because because, again, I've played it for four decades now, or three decades technically now.
Although it sounds like you played Mortal Kombat on the Game Boy for lots of times on those road trips.
It's a tough one. I will go with D &D on this one.
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
And Final Fantasy VII versus the Nintendo Wii.
Final Fantasy VII. Okay, all right.
Okay, all right, let's quickly get through the semis here.
Game Boy versus late -night.
This is where it gets real hard. this is where it gets real hard uh everyone's a winner from here on you know everyone yeah everyone's aware uh i will say i will say game boy okay late nights can already nostalgia trumps money at some stage yeah at some point and we found it um oh this seems hard dungeons and dragons against final fantasy 7 oh man that's not fair at all no uh you know what i'm i'm gonna it's very hard but i'm gonna go with final fantasy 7 just because i think it had more of like like a giant effect on me you know again i've probably put far more hours into dnd but final fantasy
7 i think had more of like an effect on my life well the final is down to two incredibly nostalgic things um i feel like if you polled like every gamer in america these two would probably be pretty especially us in our like 30s 40s you know what i mean yeah i feel like this this is probably probably you know gonna gonna be pretty high up there uh the game boy versus final fantasy 7 oh man i am going to go because of the breadth and width of what's on it the game boy beautiful you can't beat the game boy can't be trying to they got pretty close to the switch they did beat the game boy can't beat the game
boy thank you mike game boy wins it out of all those you you know i can't believe um uh bioshock didn't win it but gameboys or unreal tournament 99 might have been the the biggest outsider perhaps um yeah another another top five game for me so glad to cram it in there um i wanted to ask you about like i sort of touched upon it earlier on with the you know what do kids do these days but something that like sort of bothers me a little bit um especially when we talk about like how the internet seems to be getting and like kind of worse over the past like five ten years is like were we lucky to grow
up in the era of games that we did where it seemed like every five years there was these like fundamental leaps like does nostalgia will nostalgia is it stronger with our generation because we got to see everything just go like rocket powered or you know is this just like fucking brain chemistry man like Like the kids and the kids who are playing Minecraft and Fortnite now will think as passionately about that shit as we did, you know, when they're adults.
I kind of I kind of feel like it's more of the latter where because I'll hear people that will talk about like the GameCube and they'll be like, man, the GameCube, that was one of the greatest consoles of all time.
And we always knew that.
And it's like, did we?
Because I remember it.
I remember that reaction being quite different.
so I kind of think that every generation does that uh just because like you know when you were a kid and you weren't paying bills or getting like divorced or something like right um you know but at the same time I do think we were lucky to grow up when we did just because of those big transformations like we actually got to see like the transition from like old computer graphics into near photo realistic graphics um so I do feel lucky that we lived the time we did and i definitely wouldn't have wanted to be a previous generation uh but i do think kids today will be like remember minecraft that's
when gaming was simple easy and fun now we have these hollow games you know like it's going to be something annoying it's uh it's uh i i found that as well that what i'm finding interesting now is watching youtubers like watching video essays in their early 20s yeah like diving into shit that came out before their sort of time as well and it reminds reminds me so much of when i was writing a script on game spot or something and i had to delve into like the or you know late 80s you know i was i was born in 86 so it's like you know or like i we're right i was even we're doing this thing on dwarf
fortress and we're writing about and we interviewed somebody actually for a different project that was all about like muds like all back and like which is way before my time but it feels like it's it's weird how Now, you know, I don't know, just like the slice of gaming that you grew up in, the slice of society you grew up in is sort of your only viewpoint.
And everything that came before is sort of just got you to there and everything came after is just like derivative, right?
Yeah, exactly. Just based on all the cool shit that you saw.
But it is like, like you said, I've seen like people doing video essays on like PlayStation 2 games and being like, man, these retro games.
I'm like, oh, my favorite retro game, Tekken Tag Tournament.
You're like, no, no, no. Metal Gear Solid 3.
they don't make them like that anymore you know it's fucking god fucking grim and speaking of new games uh what have you been playing recently and what what's some stuff that you enjoyed last year that didn't stand out for you well last year i definitely enjoyed ufo 50 uh that like the idea i was excited about it when they announced it years before the idea of making 50 fake nintendo or 8 -bit because it's its own fictional system style games that are all complete games is amazing to me and the fact that i'd say 85 of them are super fun and the other 15 are interesting they're not bad but the other
15 you're more like i get it but 85 of them are great it's a better hit rate than the than the nintendo yeah i mean seriously yeah um and so that was probably my favorite thing of last year i also really loved uh the tetris gold master series from digital eclipse oh yeah because I love those games and I love museums um and uh it was just like it was also at the end of November when things were feeling a little rough and it was kind of nice to watch like this very cheerful documentary about Tetris and these two guys were very different men but they somehow came together over their love of puzzles
like it's so nice and playing old Tetris games like playing like not the Japanese Super Tetris but the Super Tetris that was by Spectrum Holobite for DOS like playing that again is crazy to me because I haven't played that in maybe 25 years right and so I really really really loved it and I loved playing all these weird obscure Tetris games that no one's heard of so that was genuinely like I put like 30 hours into a Tetris game which is insane to me that's fantastic as far as that Jordan Meck the Prince of Persia one that did I really enjoyed it was so good yeah his dad was such a good character
I know what a guy just like love is that songs and shit and you know yeah best um and then what i'm playing now i think uh i'm in the middle of avowed which i'm liking oh cool nice did you play much outer worlds i did i did yeah i'm liking about a bit more than outer worlds but i thought outer worlds was fine i think you know i feel like people are expecting about to be skyrim and the fact that it's not skyrim i think has made people mad at it for some reason even though they weren't promising skyrim but to me it's fun and i'm enjoying it and the characters are fun it's a good time good writing
good writing stuff those obsidian people value writing very much so did you play pentament at all i loved pentament my man nice okay i love hell yeah nice one we're tight we're hitting something we're hitting some of your favorites then on noclip as well but pentamint's really like a game where you're like i grew up catholic this will be fun there's been a lot of those recently yeah it's been that and fucking indica i mean that's kind of russian orthodox when we we talk about this on the podcast all the time it's been like you know blasphemous 2 was one of my favorite games from a couple of years
ago as well it's a good time we're in it's cool to be catholic right now it's all kicking off i'm like shit maybe i should get back on board you know there's a lot of lore there's a lot of Catholicism you're right there's a lot of lore exactly there should be more i feel like yeah why aren't we getting is jewish games going to be next is that because they've got way more lore than catholic you know well i guess no they have deeper they They have more ownership over the original lore.
That's probably the best way to put it.
Although we plucked golems out of there.
We took their golems and turned them into fantasy monsters.
Exactly. It's true.
So much good shit. Oh my God.
All right, Mike. On that note, let's remind people one more time.
Good game, no rematch. A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker.
It's available now.
Where books are, we'll have links in the description.
It'll be available when the podcast goes live as well.
well great to chat dude yeah you as well yeah i was always a pleasure uh best luck with the book do you are you done uh how do you feel about books right now is this the is this the moment where you least want to write another book again like right now and you've just finished it you're doing all this shit yes it's it's it's the least i want to write a book again if it comes out and people are really nice about it then i'll be like i'm gonna do a book right now excellent so hopefully back in the saddle terrific yes i really enjoyed it um fun to sort of uh a lot of of stuff like i said um mirrored
my experience for sure but um yeah i mean you're writing you're just you know you're a funny dude man i'm thank you not the first person to fucking tell obviously late night's been paying those bills yeah um so yeah it's uh it's uh i i would say off air i've read a lot of memoirs over the years and some of them are written by people who think they're funny and they're fucking not so this one was uh i'm not naming names but this one was uh was was an absolute dream to get through so i appreciate that a lot all right mike we'll see you again in the future and thanks for listening to the podcast
folks we'll see you on the next one bye
