transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:27] Hey, buddies, welcome to the Completely Unnecessary Podcast. Whoa, it's the CU Podcast for Tuesday, April 21st, 2026.

Speaker 2:
[00:43] I'm Ian Ferguson.

Speaker 1:
[00:44] Ian Ferguson in a, what is that T-shirt? Unknown.

Speaker 2:
[00:48] It says Unknown Pleasures.

Speaker 1:
[00:49] It's like an 80s sort of little news port font. Yeah, and I'm Pat Contri. On the show today, oh, we got a doozy for you. We've got three main topics. We haven't done that since the old days. Back when, maybe back when we were at Condo Contri before Castle Contri.

Speaker 2:
[01:05] Olden times.

Speaker 1:
[01:06] We used to do the Q&A's everywhere. We kind of miss the Q&A's.

Speaker 2:
[01:10] Q&A's were here. Those weren't at...

Speaker 1:
[01:11] We did Q&A's at the condo. We first did the Q&A's way back. Like the half hour sprawling Q&A's.

Speaker 2:
[01:18] Oh, those, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[01:19] Somewhere live, remember, Pat?

Speaker 2:
[01:21] I was thinking the voicemail.

Speaker 1:
[01:22] Oh, the voicemail. Sorry, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[01:24] That was more recent.

Speaker 1:
[01:25] The voicemails were good. I just didn't like filtering those. Anyway, on the show today, we got 20 years of AVGN while the gaming historian, our pal, calls it quits to YouTube. The Neo Geo Plus console, a Phil Adam interview, the current... Oh, it's not even Intellivision. The current or CEO of, what is it called? Just Amico?

Speaker 2:
[01:51] Yeah. The Amico company? Yeah. Amico Entertainment. Amico Entertainment.

Speaker 1:
[01:57] And so, we got some doozies on that. And we'll check in with one of our old pals in the podcast, Pals Slash Enemies. So, that's a fun one.

Speaker 2:
[02:04] Oh. I was literally just struggling to think of what you meant by that.

Speaker 1:
[02:09] Real quick, we'll start some weird news. I looked into and got an update on what's been happening on the WADA games class action, federal class action lawsuit for fraud and racketeering and false advertising stuff that's now like almost three years in about. I think it's three years or more. And I hadn't heard an update in several months, and I got word from someone that checked that said the case was dismissed without prejudice. You should know the difference between with and without prejudice.

Speaker 2:
[02:41] I mean, I certainly do.

Speaker 1:
[02:42] We'll explain to you afterwards. You're the legal episode of the podcast. Without prejudice, which is the better of the two, because the council for the prosecution just abandoned the case. There hadn't been a filing, a court filing in several months of any follow up. And so I guess the judge was just like, all right, this is not not happened anymore. So it's unfortunate because I think they were making some headway. They've gone through a lot. They've gone through a bunch of depositions. We had a lot of good information come out about that $100,000 Super Mario sale, being made out of thin air because everyone knew each other and things of that nature. And I don't understand what happened. So I tried to reach out to the public number on record for the attorney, and the number is disconnected. It's one of those, we're sorry, you're called like those stuff used to here like in the 80s. And then I went to the website, the website was gone, the legal website was gone. Oh, last I checked.

Speaker 2:
[03:38] Well, something happened there.

Speaker 1:
[03:39] So like, I'm not saying this is something nefarious.

Speaker 2:
[03:42] No, I don't think it's nefarious at all.

Speaker 1:
[03:45] I hope the lawyer's health is okay, like nothing weird happened, but like it's like the lawyer doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 2:
[03:52] It's wild. I don't know. Maybe the career just didn't work out and this was something they were working on and they just had to let it go.

Speaker 1:
[03:57] Well, I know this was not their main focus of law was doing this. So the fact that, I don't know, like I said, I don't know. Anyway, so Ian, what's the difference between with and without prejudice?

Speaker 2:
[04:08] Without prejudice means that the case can be brought again.

Speaker 1:
[04:10] There you go. So I'm hoping that the plaintiffs can, I don't know how easy it is to find counsel to pick up where he left off after it's been in the works for like two and a half, three years. And tons of money has been spent already by the defense. I mean, either way, this is not a win for WADA games. That IP or brand is so tarnished even before this. But the fact of the matter is, there are lawyers probably spent, I'm guessing you're talking three years of lawyers back and forth. On that side, you're talking, I don't know how many seven figures that is, but not a small amount of a team of defense lawyers going through this for trying to block this off for several years.

Speaker 2:
[04:51] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[04:51] And go to depositions.

Speaker 2:
[04:52] Yeah. That's not cheap at all. In fact, a lot of times, especially with businesses, if you take a case against a business, let's just use employment law as an example.

Speaker 1:
[05:04] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[05:06] There is a point in time where bookkeepers and people will start to look at how much money has been spent on the legal case so far, go back to the offers that were made in mediation and be like, okay, yeah, we can't, like, this just doesn't make any sense anymore. Like, we've already spent way too much money on this.

Speaker 1:
[05:26] Yeah, it's always, going to trial is always way more money than you bargain for versus just like, hey, let's just have, we both save money in the long run. Let's just work it out.

Speaker 2:
[05:36] It's more expensive and sometimes you stand to get less money depending on the situation.

Speaker 1:
[05:41] Sure, it can be like, all right, you win, we're not gonna give you that much.

Speaker 2:
[05:43] Right. I mean, that happens. Sometimes it's beneficial to be at the whims of a jury and sometimes it's not.

Speaker 1:
[05:49] Famously, something that our president ruined before the reputation of this country, the USFL, he was a USFL owner in the mid-80s. The USFL, it was a rival of the NFL and he wanted to sue the NFL because they said they had an unfair monopoly. You have an unfair monopoly, NFL, we're gonna sue you. They actually won. They're like, the jury was like, oh yeah. Yeah, they kind of have a monopoly. They awarded a dollar.

Speaker 2:
[06:15] Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:16] Put the league out of business.

Speaker 2:
[06:18] Wow. I didn't actually know that.

Speaker 1:
[06:19] You don't know that story?

Speaker 2:
[06:20] No.

Speaker 1:
[06:20] There's a whole documentary about the USFL.

Speaker 2:
[06:22] Oh shit. Probably be interesting to watch. That's crazy that they... Wow. I wonder what the story behind that was.

Speaker 1:
[06:29] They're probably just like, well, you showed no damages.

Speaker 2:
[06:32] Well, yeah. And that's exactly it.

Speaker 1:
[06:34] The NFL has been around at that point. They've been unified, the AFL and the NFL, for like at that point for 20, almost 20 years.

Speaker 2:
[06:40] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:40] And it's like...

Speaker 2:
[06:40] That is one of those things. And that's the other thing I think people forget is, you don't just magically get awarded because the other side was wrong. You have to prove that the whole point of law that you learn is it's to make... You're trying to make the person whole who suffered from the action. And that means the way that we look at that is in monetary amounts.

Speaker 1:
[07:04] Yeah. It's like, okay, so you're a new football league. The NFL is huge. So what do you think you're owed because you're a rival league that just started?

Speaker 2:
[07:13] I'm not sure it's a monopoly, but yeah.

Speaker 1:
[07:15] How much did that actually hurt you?

Speaker 2:
[07:16] You knew what an uphill battle it would be.

Speaker 1:
[07:19] And the jury was probably like, no, it didn't damage you at all. Like, if you were around for 20 years before this and they were doing these cons and actions against you, you know what I mean, as a rival, that's something different. I'm surprised you didn't know that. That's like a famous thing. The USFL had big stars.

Speaker 2:
[07:34] Oh, I know. I believe that's where Jim Kelly came from.

Speaker 1:
[07:36] Elway? What was the big running back that went to the Cowboys? He was there? Yeah, there's a lot of stars. Anyway.

Speaker 2:
[07:45] Anyway.

Speaker 1:
[07:47] Disney pulled a billion dollars from their open AI investment, which was basically the Sora Video app. It was the video slop AI content part that everyone was using the past year. I guess Disney probably saw that as valuable and be like, well, we can use that technology to make content for us.

Speaker 2:
[08:07] So what it was was, it was weird because I remember we actually talked about this. Disney decided to put like, they invested the billion in it, and they were going to allow, excuse me, they were going to allow people to use like, like the license characters would be allowed to be used in Sora. And honestly, I feel like they just kind of, without thinking it through at all, looked at it as a haphazard way to easily, you know, make, it's advertising, you know, it's constantly allowing those characters to be thrown in your face.

Speaker 1:
[08:46] I looked at it as more of a general AI investment to get it. I almost looked at it, by the way, they didn't, they pulled their money. So like, I guess it was never 100% final, or maybe they had an out period where they can like pull out. But I think what it was where they thought, well, this is amazing on the servers, you can say, oh, show me Darth Vader's snowboarding while eating a hot dog and it shows up.

Speaker 2:
[09:05] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:05] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[09:06] But they're not thinking about what...

Speaker 1:
[09:08] What do you do with that?

Speaker 2:
[09:10] Right, nothing.

Speaker 1:
[09:11] And you can't edit it, you can't customize it. It's lost into the ether once the command goes out.

Speaker 2:
[09:18] I believe there was talk about like taking some of the shorts and putting them on like Disney Plus. Yeah, none of that ever happened.

Speaker 1:
[09:29] And we called this year, at least I did, I think you did too, like this is the year the AI bubble pops. In terms of this, it's already popped. It's already popped because...

Speaker 2:
[09:38] I was hoping, but it seems like it got... It's a slow deflate and I hate that and I don't know why, but people are going to hang on until the end because so much money is tied up in it. But to me, I saw that and literally felt joy. Like I got excited when I saw that because that's big. Well, Disney basically saying, actually we don't have faith in this. And I saw so many articles try to spin it as Disney being short-sighted and it's like, no.

Speaker 1:
[10:04] Because, well, the same thing happened with, I think with like Grok is now paywalled on Twitter and people were abusing that for creating images and saying, well, they got in trouble getting sued by Europe because they were like, oh, a picture of someone, oh, show me them with lingerie on and Grok would just do it.

Speaker 2:
[10:20] Oh yeah, they were using Grok to undress women in the replies.

Speaker 1:
[10:25] And women, everyone. Yeah, and maybe children in some of these.

Speaker 2:
[10:29] Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 1:
[10:30] So I think Disney saw it and was like, oh, maybe we saw a pipeline to this in the future where we can use to generate content for films. But no, it's worthless. The generative AI is apps. And plus, it's so expensive that now even these paid apps are shut down. You can't use, like Sora is basically going to be gone, I think. They're sunsetting it because they're bleeding money. The cost to do this, to say like, oh, show me a penguin fighting in the Bloodsport Ring. Okay, cool. But what's the cost of that on the back end? And how are we going to make back these super duper costs of having these data centers and all the energy and the water are cool? And they're finally realizing, oh, we're never going to make our money back on this. So a lot of these data centers that are playing, Ian, they're no longer being built. They're realizing that this is not sustainable. Plus, a lot of these local neighborhoods and communities are fighting back.

Speaker 2:
[11:34] Yes, thank goodness.

Speaker 1:
[11:36] On top of that, too.

Speaker 2:
[11:37] I've been reading about that and that's been making me very happy. The other problem that's been happening with AI is just to, well, all sorts of problems. You mentioned penguin fighting in the Bloodsport Ring and how much it costs to do these party tricks, essentially. Yes, the choice. That's a problem that we're seeing in other businesses now where people are loading up ChatGPT when they sit down at their desk, and they're using it as a timer, which is inaccurate. They're using it as a calculator. People are just, great, but they're relying on ChatGPT to do everything. And it's these simple, low-energy-cost tasks that are now being amplified by people just becoming too dependent on ChatGPT.

Speaker 1:
[12:22] Yeah, because if you're asking an AI to do a basic calculation, it has to look up someone else's calculator versus just using the calculator on your desktop.

Speaker 2:
[12:32] Right. Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[12:33] Which is what it's designed to do. Or I always keep my 20-year-old solar power calculator by my desk with the little big buttons. I love it. So I can do that.

Speaker 2:
[12:41] Cassio just released a really pretty calculator that I kind of wanted to buy. The special one, S100X. There you go.

Speaker 1:
[12:50] I wish I still had my HP graphing calculator. With sound in a speaker, I had in high school. I had a space emitter, it actually had sound. I was like, but it was hard to program and use.

Speaker 2:
[13:00] Mine beeped, but it didn't have like, it had a PC speaker, but it didn't have-

Speaker 1:
[13:04] Mine had a nice speaker.

Speaker 2:
[13:05] Interesting.

Speaker 1:
[13:06] But it was hard to use.

Speaker 2:
[13:07] Color? No.

Speaker 1:
[13:09] Color was like-

Speaker 2:
[13:09] Mine was black.

Speaker 1:
[13:10] Color was like a year after I was in high school. That's when color got out there. Now, most people had the TI-818283 or the 80 back then, or the 84 was the big one, right? That was the black one. That was the one everyone wanted.

Speaker 2:
[13:22] Wanted, but I think I had like the TI-83 plus or something like that.

Speaker 1:
[13:25] You had like the gray 83 or 82?

Speaker 2:
[13:26] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:26] I mean, they mostly did the same thing, but 84 probably had more juice. Was 84? That was a big one, 84.

Speaker 2:
[13:31] All that mattered was everyone played games on the 83 because that's what everyone had.

Speaker 1:
[13:36] So you got your Drug Wars or I remember someone had their version of a first person like a Duman.

Speaker 2:
[13:42] I played all sorts of interesting things on those calculators. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:45] I'm not sure where I even found that for my HP, the program for the Space Invaders. But like I said, it was pretty good. It had some chunky sounds. But so yeah, so the video AI toy days are, I think, are coming to an end. Because I wish I put the cost down. You actually saw the cost of like the cost to produce one of those like 10-second or 30-second videos versus like, hey, I'm paying 10 bucks a month for this video AI servers. But then like I'm producing a $1,000 worth of videos basically a month. And like it doesn't make any business sense.

Speaker 2:
[14:21] Doesn't make any business sense. But I think they underestimate or they overestimate their ability to hold the public's attention. The public's already turning against it. But even people who are gung-ho pro AI now, like you said earlier, what do you do with these movie clips? It's a party trick. And you know what? Your friends are going to stop laughing soon, and you're going to stop laughing, and it's no longer going to be amusing. And the very, very little bit of AI that's like jangling keys in front of some people, that's going to disappear. And then all you have nothing.

Speaker 1:
[14:53] Yeah, the one thing I did think was cute, I will admit, but even I got tired was like, inserting cats into 70s kung-fu scenes. That was actually was amusing. That was like the best use I ever saw of it.

Speaker 2:
[15:05] I don't think there was ever a good use for it, but it just...

Speaker 1:
[15:10] So Disney got out of that, but they also fired more than a thousand staff members. From the visual development team.

Speaker 2:
[15:19] Yes, the Marvel visual development team, which has basically worked on...

Speaker 1:
[15:25] 30 movies?

Speaker 2:
[15:26] Yeah, almost all of them. What did you say? Since Iron Man?

Speaker 1:
[15:30] Well, that was before Disney bought it, but probably the same folks where they are establishing the visual language of these films that carried through to making billions and billions of dollars. And now it's like, we don't need you. We'll just, I guess, we'll just outsource. We'll have like a skeleton crew of supervisors and we'll just outsource everything. Which I know they always outsource anyway, here and there.

Speaker 2:
[15:52] Yes, but you still had a unified design, a visual design team.

Speaker 1:
[15:56] Yes, and I did have like, I knew someone that worked like on the Singapore team, for example, but that was still under their umbrella. Like this is still Disney's company. We're just trying to save money in some place else. So it's terrible. I don't understand how you could do this.

Speaker 2:
[16:14] How you retract a billion dollars, but then have to, none of it makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[16:21] They started with their new CEO. That was the first thing they did was fire a thousand people. Ah, how good. Josh Demaro. There you go. Impacted employees in both Burbank and New York. Awesome. That's such great news. Given the fast moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically enabled workforce to meet tomorrow's needs.

Speaker 2:
[16:48] You know how much I love that kind of speak. So good.

Speaker 1:
[16:51] Corporate space is the best. And then Epic fired more than a thousand employees, Epic Games.

Speaker 2:
[16:56] Not to make that a footnote, but what else? What else? What? There's nothing else to say.

Speaker 1:
[17:04] The store never, I guess, became really profitable. The Steam has a much stronger hold. Probably, I'm guessing, Fortnite. We're almost 10 years into Fortnite.

Speaker 2:
[17:17] I think we talked about that a couple episodes ago, or at least I was reading about it about a month ago, that Fortnite is really falling off. And Tim Sweeney, I was reading what he was saying about it, and he's like, we've got to promise that we're going to... The big flaw of all these people, and I don't think it's that they don't know, it's just that they depend on people's interest in something being infinite and eternal. And that's just not how any of this works. You cannot constantly keep making... The interest level in something like Fortnite go up. At some point, you've peaked.

Speaker 1:
[17:53] They keep adding all these packs of characters, and I'm like, what's the audience for this? I mean, when we started, Fortnite's, you know, we're like teenagers, early 20s, and now we're like...

Speaker 2:
[18:03] We were the... We were the premier... PUBG... Public Battlegrounds G.

Speaker 1:
[18:10] Oh, wow. Well, that's a 2018 podcast. Your source for PUBG news.

Speaker 2:
[18:15] Public Battlegrounds G and Fortnite.

Speaker 1:
[18:18] We were the Battle Royale tastefakers for like two years. I'm not even sure what we used to comment on back then, but we used to bring it up.

Speaker 2:
[18:25] No, it was just a joke that we made every time we brought it up because we kept bringing it up more than usual.

Speaker 1:
[18:29] That's a deep cut for our trading card set that I'm pondering.

Speaker 2:
[18:33] And the thing is, I think Fortnite is a fun game. It's a good game, but you're not going to do that. You cannot keep that many people's attention for over a decade.

Speaker 1:
[18:44] And I'm not saying...

Speaker 2:
[18:45] Close to a decade.

Speaker 1:
[18:46] I'm not saying this is karma for ignoring Unreal Tournament. But hey, it's nice to have a bunch of different products that appeal to different types of people and demographics.

Speaker 2:
[18:55] Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[18:58] Like the boomers like me that want to play Unreal Tournament. Because you haven't had a new game in 20 years at this point, which is like insane to think about. How about you spend a little bit less money on your huge dying franchise and reinvest into something else? That's why Sears failed. The fact that Sears, they still exist technically, but the fact that they couldn't adjust to like, hey, we should get into this online thing, throw some money at it and see what happens. The fact that they did nothing and let their business die. Even Blockbuster tried. It was too late, but they tried to adapt to Netflix. But they were like a year and a half too late and that was it. Or only a year late and it was too late.

Speaker 2:
[19:38] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:38] They were done.

Speaker 2:
[19:38] Oh, yeah. Couldn't catch up to Netflix.

Speaker 1:
[19:41] I did the market research back in my olden days. I saw how desperate they were to find solutions. And it was just like, hey, we're going to compare Netflix to our Blockbuster online. And it's just like, hey, you guys are slower. You know the infrastructure that Netflix has. That's it. Game over. Netflix, I get a new movie the next day. You can take Blockbuster two or three days or four days and that's it.

Speaker 2:
[20:00] So I miss the original Netflix where I could actually order. Like you could get you just got the DVD shipped to you.

Speaker 1:
[20:08] Good news, Ian. Well, I mean, we got to help this Bloodsport documentary Kickstarter out. Oh, I got to tell you about it.

Speaker 2:
[20:14] Yeah, you did.

Speaker 1:
[20:15] Fight to survive the legacy of Bloodsport. A lot of interviews already shot. The lovely Leia Aries is part of that. Van Damme is not there, but you hope that you can sit him down, pay him some money for an interview for even 20 minutes. That'd be great. And yeah, check it out. It has how many days left? They emailed me. That's how I know about it. I said, hey, I'll interview for this. I grew up watching it on my VHS tape off TBS.

Speaker 2:
[20:41] Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 1:
[20:42] I mean, they're at 46,000 left. It's 11 days ago as a time recording. Their goals, they need another $21,000. Only 168 backers, which is kind of unfortunate. But a lot of these Kickstarters, it's like you got to get attention on it. That's basically it.

Speaker 2:
[21:00] Yeah, it's true. I'll do my best to throw some money their way.

Speaker 1:
[21:06] He'll become an executive producer.

Speaker 2:
[21:08] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[21:09] Hey, I invested in a documentary before. Maybe I'll talk to him and I'll invest in this. If there's any documentary for me and Ian to get behind, I think this would be it.

Speaker 2:
[21:18] It's this one.

Speaker 1:
[21:19] Ian, you want to go into Habsies? We're putting 30 grand.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] I have a move coming up, sir.

Speaker 1:
[21:24] But they got, let's see, they got, oh, they got a Globus, who was one of the heads of Canon. Yoram Globus is there, produced Superman IV, Master of the Universe. They got Paulo Toca. Who was he playing? It's over 40, God, it's 40 years later almost, Bloodsport. You got the composers interviewed.

Speaker 2:
[21:42] Yeah, they got Donald Gibb.

Speaker 1:
[21:44] They got what? Look at the whole list. They got Abdel Kesey's in it, who was his friend in, it was the baddie in what, was it Kickboxer? Was he the one in Kickboxer, his friend, or Lionheart? I always forget that. I think they were brothers, I think. The Kesey brothers.

Speaker 2:
[21:59] Yeah, if you scroll down far enough, you'll see the cast. They've got Sheldon Ludditch, who's one of the writers, Donald Gibb, Lea Aries. Oh my god, she's still so pretty.

Speaker 1:
[22:10] Yeah, yeah, lovely.

Speaker 2:
[22:12] Paul Otoka, it was an ad, okay, yeah. Yoram Globus, obviously. Paul Herzog, that's awesome.

Speaker 1:
[22:20] Donald Gibb, the Gibb is in it. So, you got him. I think you can get Forrest Whitaker.

Speaker 2:
[22:26] Oh god.

Speaker 1:
[22:27] That would be amazing. He probably is in a marriage, like yeah, I filmed it for like six days and I was out, you know. I went to Hong Kong for fun.

Speaker 2:
[22:35] I feel like that's something he would do though.

Speaker 1:
[22:37] You think he would?

Speaker 2:
[22:38] I think he would. I just don't know how much.

Speaker 1:
[22:40] I mean, that's one of his earliest roles. That was like right between like that and Good Morning Vietnam was like right at the same time just now.

Speaker 2:
[22:46] Wasn't he? Hold on.

Speaker 1:
[22:49] It was like right around the same time.

Speaker 2:
[22:53] Let me see. He was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 82.

Speaker 1:
[22:57] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[22:59] That's the first movie I remember him being in.

Speaker 1:
[23:01] This is when he started to like blow up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always remember Good Morning Vietnam, which I think was around the same time, 87. I never saw it.

Speaker 2:
[23:09] I just know that it's good.

Speaker 1:
[23:10] You never saw Good Morning Vietnam?

Speaker 2:
[23:11] No, it's Robin Williams, Forest Whitaker. I'm trying to remember who else was in it, but no, I've never seen it. My parents rented that movie a bunch of times when I was younger. They loved it.

Speaker 1:
[23:21] Really, really good. It's not like it's framed as a comedy. It's not a comedy.

Speaker 2:
[23:25] Right.

Speaker 1:
[23:25] It's like a drama with some community.

Speaker 2:
[23:29] The 80s liked to pull those twists on the dramedies. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:33] Well, anyway, so check it out. Then maybe I'll talk to the producers. And, you know, I mean, I invested in a documentary before this. My heart would be into this.

Speaker 2:
[23:44] And I'd do it again.

Speaker 1:
[23:45] I'd do it again. I'm going to talk to who it's allegedly based on, and they're going to probably shy away from that.

Speaker 2:
[23:56] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:56] You don't want to get into that too much. But they even admit in this short teaser how like, yeah, Van Dam saved the movie in the edit. Young, plucky Van Dam knew what he was doing somehow. Sony's raising PS5 prices.

Speaker 2:
[24:13] Video games, great time to get into them.

Speaker 1:
[24:15] Get in early.

Speaker 2:
[24:16] Lots of thriving developers, well-staffed, and couldn't be cheaper to buy a console these days. Sony has raised the price of the PlayStation 5 to $650 in the US, $600 for the digital edition, and the Pro is a whopping $900 fucking dollars.

Speaker 1:
[24:37] So what was that at launch? Let me see, was that 5?

Speaker 2:
[24:40] I think they were 5. I don't remember what the Pro's launch price was, but the systems themselves were, I think it was $499. $499, I think it was for the standard, and $450 for the, or maybe $500 and $550.

Speaker 1:
[24:58] November 7, 2024. It's only a year and a half ago. PS 5, 500 USD.

Speaker 2:
[25:06] Right. I'm talking, oh, I'm talking about launch prices. I thought that's what you were talking about. It did not launch in 2024. It launched in 2021.

Speaker 1:
[25:16] For PlayStation 5 Pro, I'm on my computer.

Speaker 2:
[25:18] Oh, the Pro. Okay, I'm sorry. Again, I got confused. I thought you were talking about the standard. So yeah, it got raised $200.

Speaker 1:
[25:25] In a year and a, what's the pat-mat? 200 over 2, what's 2 over 7?

Speaker 2:
[25:28] I don't know, but it's not going to be accurate unless you use your calculator.

Speaker 1:
[25:32] Oh, just AI the answer. 2 divided by 7, 28 and a half percent price jacked. Could this, we never thought that like consoles would be like totally dead after this generation. Like they would still persist for some years. This could help usher it in. Because at what point you're like, okay, I'm not spending $1,000 on a console. This is crazy. Like that, the whole point was for these consoles to be affordable because you couldn't afford like a big PC rig. And now you just buy a PC. It's crazy.

Speaker 2:
[26:03] I would love to agree. And I, but something I've learned as I've gotten older is that all of these things, all of the cycles are stubborn and routine is stubborn. And I don't think the market is there, but it would not surprise me if Sony tries to do another one.

Speaker 1:
[26:25] And sure, because they had a lot to risk.

Speaker 2:
[26:27] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[26:27] You know, you have to, you have to sell your game.

Speaker 2:
[26:29] Right. You've got to, they're at a point, especially with how, you know, stocks and the C suites and stuff like that are. It's all about returns, returns, returns. I know they can't just stop, but there is an end to this. Well, I guess, we'll keep trying.

Speaker 1:
[26:47] Well, I guess, like, it's so funny. May it be the race to who's going to give up their console first, Microsoft or Sony? Who's going to end the console production first and make the smart decision?

Speaker 2:
[26:58] I don't think it would be Sony.

Speaker 1:
[27:00] No, they're tied in more. But this is crazy. I mean, that's a 28% increase.

Speaker 2:
[27:05] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[27:08] I mean, it has nothing to do with this Iranian War thing going on. But I mean, like, how could this technology be that everything's connected, AI, the memory company shit, it's all connected on some level. I do get that. But 28% increase when you never had a price increase on consoles almost ever in the history before this current generation. It never happened. It was never, oh, Ian, you better buy Nintendo now because next year the NES might go up. That didn't exist. That was not a concern.

Speaker 2:
[27:37] Yeah. Well, you know where things are not 28% more expensive than they were last time we checked? ultimatenintendo.com.

Speaker 1:
[27:45] That's right, Ian. At there, you can pre-order the new NES book that I got to dive in and do a lot of work end of April and May. I got to make make hay as it's called. You can order enamel stickers with our cute, chubby faces on them and nice hair there. You can announce that now it means that clean shaven on the pins or it doesn't match them anymore. We have to make a new pin.

Speaker 2:
[28:06] I mean, I don't have long hair anymore.

Speaker 1:
[28:09] RBI baseball stickers. You can get some DVDs. No more t-shirts. I'm keeping the last t-shirt. I refunded that person money months ago. I was like, now I got to keep one of these t-shirts for myself. All at ultimatenintendo.com. We're on the Twitch every week. Ian on Thursday spinning the hits at Pixel Sickle.

Speaker 2:
[28:28] The hot tunes.

Speaker 1:
[28:29] And every Wednesday, for six years, I'm coming up of watching TV commercials every week on Contricode. I thought about doing it.

Speaker 2:
[28:39] Mind-blowing.

Speaker 1:
[28:39] Because you're allowed now to simulcast to YouTube. I've cast to YouTube twice in the past. Once I did a live unboxing of the Super Nintendo Classic. You know how many people watch me do that? Over 10,000 people watch me. So the YouTube algorithm, I think, is a lot different for live versus Twitch, there's different audiences. So I might one time try to do it on YouTube, but I kind of fear what that live chat would be versus Twitch. But you get a lot of eyeballs on you.

Speaker 2:
[29:07] Can't you just dual stream?

Speaker 1:
[29:09] Yes, you can. Yeah, but the point is I won't be able to keep track or moderate both chats.

Speaker 2:
[29:13] Oh, right, right, right, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:15] So maybe I just don't have to chat on the other one?

Speaker 2:
[29:17] Yeah, I would say just mute the chat. I'd be like, if you want to chat, go to Twitch.

Speaker 1:
[29:22] Yeah, I don't know. Either way, I've never done that. I'm leaving money on the table, like the chat community is so great on Twitch. You'll leave all the memes, and you got stickers, too, you can get to. Anyway, what else is going on here? I should probably announce, I think I'm gonna be at Too Many Games in two months. Too Many Games, Too Many Games, Too Many Games! Out there in Pennsylvania. It's like, you know, you get that COVID year in between there, but, you know, 10, 11, 12 years straight. 2014 is, I think, the first year I went there.

Speaker 2:
[29:51] Boom, boom.

Speaker 1:
[29:52] So yeah, that'll be fun to do that. And then, you want to open up your birthday gifts?

Speaker 2:
[29:57] Oh yeah. So it's not my birthday.

Speaker 1:
[30:01] Jamie from Toledo.

Speaker 2:
[30:02] We're a considerable amount of time away from my birthday, but someone sent me a birthday gift.

Speaker 1:
[30:06] Well, it's Jamie from Toledo. Sent me a giant box. He sent me several Street Fighter figures. These are a couple years old. They're very nice.

Speaker 2:
[30:16] Oh hell yeah, those are really nice. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
[30:18] That's my favorite character, my main beefy Ryu. And he sent us a Christmas card a few months late that I'll just say real quick.

Speaker 2:
[30:26] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[30:26] It's beginning to wookie a lot like Christmas. Thank you, Jamie. Happy 2025. He said there. And then he got you birthday gifts.

Speaker 2:
[30:36] Yeah. So I'm looking. Oh, it's a very cute card. It's a dinosaur with a party hat, and I do love dinosaurs. And it says, I wish you a very bladed birthday. And I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Let me see what we got here. All right. We got. Oh, we got stickers.

Speaker 1:
[30:54] We got stickers.

Speaker 2:
[30:55] We have peanuts, peanuts, Halloween stickers.

Speaker 1:
[30:58] They don't see it when you're on there. You gotta go to the middle.

Speaker 2:
[31:01] I got you. This feels like a cute.

Speaker 1:
[31:07] Oh, oh, oh, oh, it's.

Speaker 2:
[31:09] Oh, all right. That's pretty great.

Speaker 1:
[31:14] We got here.

Speaker 2:
[31:14] It's Latino heat.

Speaker 1:
[31:15] Light sheet and steel, a red, red and white Guerrero shirt, Eddie Guerrero shirt. That's great. Oh, black tiger on the black. OK, so that's really nice. Some Japanese flattering there easily.

Speaker 2:
[31:28] Top three favorite wrestler.

Speaker 1:
[31:29] Top three, really?

Speaker 2:
[31:31] Oh, if he's. Oh, this is funny.

Speaker 1:
[31:37] All right.

Speaker 2:
[31:37] So he got me a Macho Man, Randy Savage figure. So I was just about to tell you, that's great. That'll look good on the show.

Speaker 1:
[31:45] It has a cloth shirt on it.

Speaker 2:
[31:47] That's really awesome. And the face, multiple faces, sunglasses and the cowboy hat. It's funny because I was just about to say to you, I debate with myself all the time over whether Macho Man or Eddie is my favorite wrestler.

Speaker 1:
[32:03] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[32:04] I don't know which one is, but Eddie's definitely up there.

Speaker 1:
[32:08] OK, thank you. Thank you so much, Jamie. I just got a couple of T-shirts of the Toledo Rockets local team.

Speaker 2:
[32:14] Nice.

Speaker 1:
[32:16] It's known New Hampshire Fisher Cats.

Speaker 2:
[32:18] I have a friend who lives up there, so yeah, I'm going to see what I can do.

Speaker 1:
[32:22] So I found out Fisher Cats are my pride. It's because San Diego Zoo has one, and they're only in like Southeast Asia. I didn't know it was a thing before I went to the San Diego Zoo.

Speaker 2:
[32:32] It was the first time I ever heard of a Fisher Cat too, way back in 2000.

Speaker 1:
[32:36] So I should probably didn't say this because the jury will go up in value. So there's a minor league team, that's the Toronto Blue Jays, a minor league single A farm team. And they did a contest. And for some reason, Fisher Cat was one of the choices and it won. Even though no one in New Hampshire probably thinks that they're, what's a Fisher Cat? But they have it and it's cute logo, there's a claw, there's a little cat face.

Speaker 2:
[32:59] Well, I've got a, my friend Wyatt lives up there and it was literally like two days after you sent me that text, he was posting in our group chat online and he sent a picture and I was like, wait a second, oh my God, he's at a Fisher Cat's game. So he was actually at a game.

Speaker 1:
[33:19] Awesome. Yeah. We don't have a local San Diego minor league team, do we?

Speaker 2:
[33:23] No, we don't. And I got to be honest with you. It is a shame because one of the things I loved doing in Buffalo in the summers and I will be doing again, is going to our Triple A baseball teams games.

Speaker 1:
[33:35] Oh, Triple A. Oh, you can see some major leaguers in there.

Speaker 2:
[33:37] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think I told you once not to get too off track, but the Bisons used to be the farm team for the Cleveland Indians. So my friends and I would go to Buffalo Bisons games and then we would go travel to Cleveland to watch games as they got called up.

Speaker 1:
[33:58] Got you.

Speaker 2:
[33:58] It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:
[34:00] All right. You want to talk about an old friend of the show?

Speaker 2:
[34:02] Oh, God. So you know more about this than me. I'm just going to preface this by saying, we're watching a body count pile up here.

Speaker 1:
[34:12] Yeah. I was going to say this. It's not karma at all. It's not a cosmic thing. But if you aren't a former or current enemy of the CU podcast, you have not had a good run the past few years. Let's just say that. Whether it was good old Revu Tech, whether it was good old Smash JT embroiled in a lawsuit that he's currently going down in flames and being outed as a weird chat GBT delusional moron publicly.

Speaker 2:
[34:45] Smash, you want to write me a love letter?

Speaker 1:
[34:48] How should I apologize for Ian for saying he faked his medical issues?

Speaker 2:
[34:53] Can you tell me a bedtime story, Jeff?

Speaker 1:
[34:55] So another one of the crew that used to brigade us and go after us. The first was because of our opinion about, God forbid, a mobile game that Ian said was going to be trashed back in 2018, Diablo Immortal, which we just laughed about the overreaction. We never said it's going to be a good game or you should play it. We just said like, hey, just relax. You're going to get a regular Diablo Immortal, Diablo game again. So just take it easy. So for a couple of weeks, our channel was like brigaded back then. And it was like a lot of these like people that were still frothing at the mouth from like Gamergate a couple of years before that.

Speaker 2:
[35:29] And then he tussled with us again over something else a year later.

Speaker 1:
[35:32] And I don't even remember the Sonic movie.

Speaker 2:
[35:35] Or I said something stupid in the you said a little comment about it.

Speaker 1:
[35:38] I set him off.

Speaker 2:
[35:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:40] Or did we say something like like like the fact that he was complaining about the She-Ra character not being hot enough for him or something?

Speaker 2:
[35:46] Either way, touchy. He's touchy.

Speaker 1:
[35:48] We clapped back at the time. I never put the video online, but we clapped back in the audio version. That set him off again. So that was pretty much the last. So he's a sensitive person, Jeremy Hambly. So but we always knew this person was just trash, obviously. But sometimes it takes the rest of the world to find out. So the last week and a half hasn't been good for Jer. Because these streamers on the Kik platform, Kino Casino, who are like these sort of like, you know, edgy sort of like...

Speaker 2:
[36:22] Edgy lords.

Speaker 1:
[36:23] Yeah, they're like...

Speaker 2:
[36:25] Not my favorite content, but...

Speaker 1:
[36:27] Sure, but it's what I would have watched or listened to like 25 years or 20 years ago, like on talk radio, like Opie and Anthony sort of stuff. It is what it is.

Speaker 2:
[36:37] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[36:37] So don't give me that look.

Speaker 2:
[36:39] I'm just saying we don't need to make anyone look like a good guy just for finding a bad guy.

Speaker 1:
[36:43] The point is that you get this weird purity thing. But anyway, so the fact of the matter is they were critical of a lot of stuff that the Corey was saying publicly about his personal life, about his friend's wife, inviting his one to see his friend's wife in the hot tub, in quotes, her big boobs. And just like really things like that you should not put on front street. But so they started talking about these things. They started like, hey, what's happening with you and your friend? Is this a swinging situation? Is this a cuck situation? Like this is weird and poking fun at, but it's all stuff out in the open.

Speaker 2:
[37:23] Right.

Speaker 1:
[37:23] It's their right to do that. This isn't private stuff.

Speaker 2:
[37:25] They're responding to what they see. It's public.

Speaker 1:
[37:28] It's fair game. And they weren't taking shots at the quartering's wife. They absolutely were not. So he got pissy about it, even though he's gone after us before. He's gone after the husbands and wives of other famous people. He's done a hundred videos about Brie Lawson on his own.

Speaker 2:
[37:44] Very sensible.

Speaker 1:
[37:45] Yes. So the fact of the matter is he could not take the heat. So what he did the Friday before last, they have a clip channel, the Kino Casino guys, where they put years of old clips. A lot of people, they'll stream and do clips, of the uploads, of like highlights.

Speaker 2:
[37:59] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[37:59] He had allegedly the entire channel nuked. Not just like the video or two talking about him, the entire channel was nuked. This was like the Friday afternoon, right before the weekend. So these guys couldn't do anything about it. So it was like, huh.

Speaker 2:
[38:17] Now that's what I call free speech absolutism.

Speaker 1:
[38:19] Absolutely. Absolute, absolute. And this is a guy that in private DMs was saying to like, I think he said to one of the heads of either Kick or Rumble streaming site says, all I need to make one phone call and I could make it disappear. So he admitted before this happened that he had the stroke to do this, which is alarming because no one should have the power to make one phone call and get an entire channel nuked. If you got an issue with one video or two for whatever reason, target those videos. You don't nuke an entire fucking channel, which is like the way some people are making money. And it turns out that's how these, Q2Cosino, that's how their editor makes their money. All the money goes to this person who does it full time. So now you're just taking someone's money away from them and just being a total piece of shit because you're a sensitive loser. So the internet did not respond to this well because this is like to a lot of us, this is like the red line you do not cross. This is like the chemical warfare line. So this was the past week or so has been glorious because right, left, middle, did not matter. Everyone now has good old Jeremy in their sights. Going over with a fine-tooth, every questionable, weird thing this guy said in the live stream, embarrassing his wife by leering at other women on chat and making weird comments about shitting and things like that. Just like peeing in his basement, shitting in a fucking Target or Walmart and admitting to it and running to the bathroom with shit coming down. It's just like weird stuff you don't admit publicly to people. And so everyone's going after him. The Keno Casino guys are now in the limelight because it's like, now these guys are famous because everyone rallies behind this because this is like the worst thing you can do to someone. It's to target their channel for elimination, especially when you might have made a phone call and had your rep or someone at Google do it, which is disgusting. Too much power for one person to have and it's reprehensible. Everyone's been talking about it. Even beanie-wearing Tim Pool commented saying, yeah, this guy's basically a loser and I blocked him. Like that's the point we're at. All I'm going to say is this in terms of this, couldn't happen to a nicer fellow. That's all.

Speaker 2:
[40:43] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[40:43] It's a shame.

Speaker 2:
[40:44] It's a shame.

Speaker 1:
[40:45] Then I think breaking news was, I think I saw in the timeline that the quartering, good old Jeremy decided that, hey, we're taking a spring break. We'll be gone for at least two or three weeks. I guess he won't be doing his live stream or doing something for me. That's what I saw.

Speaker 2:
[40:59] Yeah. Just a break. No reason.

Speaker 1:
[41:01] Just a break. And yeah, they didn't have a lot more to say about it. But I never told you this. There was a point in time, I want to talk about the coffee thing real quick. I didn't tell you there was a point in time where he added me a couple of times throughout the year saying, hey, Pat, why don't we should talk about how you helped me complete my NES game set. I never told you that. Oh. And I just ignored him.

Speaker 2:
[41:21] Gross.

Speaker 1:
[41:22] I'd rather eat my little Sampson cartridge with mustard on top than even chat friendly with you about NES games, Jeremy. Do you understand that? And then people are now investigating his Coffee Brand Coffee. Some people out there are saying it could be fraudulent. There was a tweet saying that, well, he promoted this ads like he has his own team of roasters and grinders out there selling this. This is from xJoss, said, the quartering sold Coffee Brand Coffee by saying that, one, he had employees making it, two, in his own industrial space, three, with his own industrial equipment, four, by a master roaster that was a family member or using a family recipe. And this person said, if that's bullshit, that's consumer fraud. So people are investigating his probably either dropshipped or white label coffee brand.

Speaker 2:
[42:12] Well, I don't want to sound like too harsh here, but I would not be surprised if it turned out that it was just that, because every convention I go to now, if it's a horror convention, there's someone selling horror themed coffee under their own label. If I go to a comic, it's comic-themed coffee under their own label.

Speaker 1:
[42:36] So it's easy to just have a company do it.

Speaker 2:
[42:38] I haven't looked into it, but it's like when we covered those barbecue sauces that Atari did.

Speaker 1:
[42:42] Hot sauce.

Speaker 2:
[42:43] The hot barbecue sauces. We could literally find the website that had all those flavors and they just slap a label on.

Speaker 1:
[42:49] Yeah. We thought about, hey, can you do a custom hot sauce and then we do a C-Podcast? I mean, they're out there.

Speaker 2:
[42:56] So the amount of money it would take, do you think, to truly start up a roasting and distribution business?

Speaker 1:
[43:04] It would be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Speaker 2:
[43:06] I don't buy it. It doesn't pass the smell test.

Speaker 1:
[43:09] Doesn't test the coffee smell test?

Speaker 2:
[43:10] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[43:11] So yeah, so people are investigating that. And then it blew up. This is broken containment, as they say. The H3 Podcast covered it for several hours last week. So now the quartering has a target on its back from almost everyone on the Internet.

Speaker 2:
[43:27] So. When all you do is preach hate and drama, it's gonna eat you alive.

Speaker 1:
[43:33] Well, plus when you have no talent. Like, in order to be successful. In order to be successful.

Speaker 2:
[43:38] But I kind of just assume that if that's what you're doing.

Speaker 1:
[43:41] Sure. You go for the algorithm and you go for your boomer audience that you lean to the culture grift, because that's what the boomers are more into. That's basically it. All right. Heritage Auction had a recent signature auction a few weeks ago. And the biggest thing on it, they had a punch out prototype, an early US version that was so early, it was before Mike Tyson was on it. It was Glass Joe on the label. And it seemed like something I'd seen before, either like in an early fun club or otherwise. One of those things that you think you've seen before, like you've seen a picture of the black box version of the Zelda cart where it's like Link on it. Either way, I don't know if it was Mandela Effect, but either way, this went for a good chunk of change. I watched the auction.

Speaker 2:
[44:26] 45,000.

Speaker 1:
[44:27] Yeah, I was going to be in around, I think my cutoff was going to be like 20,000. Just be like, okay, I'll see what happens. I'll put a bid in there just for the heck of it. But I didn't because it kept going and it wasn't going to stop. So the good news is that it's already been preserved. So that's the great news.

Speaker 2:
[44:46] Fairly interesting. It only has four boxes in it. There's no sound whatsoever. And it mentions... There's a guest star section that mentions Piston Hurricane and Pizza Pasta from the arcade game. So at this point in time, it definitely seems to have been trying to be more of a closer port to the arcade game.

Speaker 1:
[45:09] They still have some of the names from the arcade.

Speaker 2:
[45:11] Yeah, exactly. And then apparently there are debug options that let you move unfinished opponents around and cycle through their movesets, which is kind of cool. It just essentially causes visual bugs.

Speaker 1:
[45:22] So you got Glass Joe, Piston Honda, Don Flamenco, and Ball Bowl. Was that the four?

Speaker 2:
[45:31] Glass Joe, Ball Bowl, King Hippo, and Don Flamenco.

Speaker 1:
[45:33] King Hippo.

Speaker 2:
[45:34] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[45:34] Gotcha. And you cycle through them three times and that's what you get. And then there's a new Evercade handheld. We always joke like, hey, what's next? They did everything. We have a couple of consoles. We got a few different handhelds. You got the plug-in for the tabletop arcades thing going on. Now, there's like, you want to call it like the modern handhelds?

Speaker 2:
[45:57] Yeah. I think that's kind of what it is. So the Nexus is a, I mean, the first thing I'll say is it looks kind of like form factor wise, like a Steam Deck or the other sort of like portable gaming PCs, I guess you want to call it that.

Speaker 1:
[46:14] Two analog thumbsticks.

Speaker 2:
[46:15] Yeah. Not that powerful, but that's kind of the vibe I get from it looking at it. Two analog thumbsticks, D-pad, four face buttons, and I honestly don't know how many shoulder, two shoulder buttons.

Speaker 1:
[46:26] Four, two on each side.

Speaker 2:
[46:27] Yeah. Sorry. That's what I meant. So it looks pretty cool and it's going to be doing PlayStation, and I don't know if they're trying for N64, but they are. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[46:40] Because they're doing a Banjo pack.

Speaker 2:
[46:41] Oh yeah, you're right. So N64 and PlayStation, this is what I'll say. I very much respect what Evercade has done in terms of building and growing their business. Even like some of the products, they're just not exactly for me. And I think what they're going to run up against, maybe in the future is, if it's doing too much, would someone maybe go for a cheaper, one of those cheaper RetroArch handhelds or something like that? But this gives the collectability, and I know that's the big thing for them.

Speaker 1:
[47:17] They have jumped to the premium price range, when before it was like, oh, the handheld is under $100, and now they're jumping up a bit. Because it has to be powerful enough to do an N64 emulation, I would assume, if it's the Banjo games and PlayStation. So, at what point is like, okay, I want to get something, like you said, more expensive that can do a bit more than this?

Speaker 2:
[47:40] Right, when it starts to do too much and brush up against modern technology, then you kind of think, well, maybe I'll just get that modern technology.

Speaker 1:
[47:46] I mean, they've been great. They've been doing one main product a year for like, what, six years, about it seems.

Speaker 2:
[47:52] Yeah, and they do, they publish, in addition to the usual stuff, they've done indie cartridges, and they've done some interesting things with it. And I enjoyed my Evercade when I had one. But again, it was just, I was amassing too much stuff and didn't eat it. So I think it's cool. I do think at some point it's going to be diminishing returns.

Speaker 1:
[48:15] Just like this intro to this podcast.

Speaker 2:
[48:17] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:18] All right, Ian.

Speaker 2:
[48:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:21] There's a segment of retro gaming we don't talk about too much. You had to be a one percenter in the early 90s, to really have this console and to own it. And then you had to be pretty rich the past 10 years plus in order to collect it. The Neo Geo, especially the AES, the home console, came out in 90, later in 90, I believe, came with Magician Lord at the time.

Speaker 2:
[48:48] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[48:49] It was like $500 back then. It was like you're buying an arcade machine. It's what you're buying. Because the MVS had come out. It's the same quality. The exact same quality, interchangeable cards you can bring from the arcade back to your console. That was a thing. Had the premium quality arcade sticks. So what's happened over the past 15 years or so, the collecting of the AES got so much bigger. It was always like a niche thing because they were so expensive. So the point is, there's no cheaper games anymore for the AES. You can't buy even those quote unquote common ones. Everything is just so much more money now. So there's been a small niche sort of thing with the Neo Geo for a long time. So when I saw this announcement that they're doing a Neo Geo Plus console, I was surprised. Just because there hasn't been any real huge nostalgia for the console because of the price inherent in getting into it for so many years. It's just like, you go to conventions, you don't see... You can go to some conventions, you don't see many Neo Geo games at all. Sometimes you don't see any. You go to convention, you may not even see one AES console for sale. That's just the fact of the matter. Especially in the US., they're very uncommon even to come across them. When I see the announcement for a product like this, it hit me like, this is really strange. It's cool, it's interesting, but it's also strange because I don't know what the market will look like, who will gravitate towards this product that already doesn't have a way to play Neo Geo games through an AES or through a consoleized MVS. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2:
[50:41] I do, but I think it's not so much nostalgia for the system that would make this popular. I think the thing is, while many people did not have a Neo Geo, everyone who plays video games at this point knows SNK games, and some of them are extremely popular. Samurai Showdown, King of Fighters, those series have continued and they have huge fan bases. So my thinking on this, the reasoning behind it is, well, one, and we'll get into it, they have a lot of money behind them to spend on whatever the hell they want. They have Saudi money.

Speaker 1:
[51:20] That's the thing. SNK, as we reported three, four years ago, was bought by the Saudi Arabian Public Fund, which is the government's money.

Speaker 2:
[51:29] Yeah, it's run on blood money. That's in and of itself upsetting. However, purely as a product, I think that there's enough popularity of SNK games among collectors, on top of the fact that a lot of collectors would have been interested in Neo Geo collecting for the games, had the barrier to entry not been so high. Releasing a Neo Geo system at 250, which is going to be the price of the base unit with one arcade stick, I think it opens the door to a lot of people who probably have wanted a physical Neo Geo, but just never prior had the financial means or desire to do so.

Speaker 1:
[52:16] But I guess to that point, if it's 250, that's, I mean, it's actually a good deal because we'll get into it.

Speaker 2:
[52:23] Yeah, it's a great deal.

Speaker 1:
[52:24] But I'm just thinking if you're that hard up to get into it, I think you would have done it in the past 10 or so years. You would have found a way because the Japanese consoles, while not cheap, they were cheaper several years ago, like the games were. You could have found a way to, you know, people change the firmware on them to play any cards they buy them.

Speaker 2:
[52:45] Oh, I had a console as an MVS, yeah. I think it's still just more of a collector thing that people have wanted, and I think they will buy it, not in any crazy amount, but I don't think this is a bad or dumb idea, provided they don't think that they're going to sell tons of these. And I think this is being made for a specific sort of person. But again, I think a lot of the SNK love does not come from the Neo Geo in particular. It's just the games that people know at this point, and this is the system they played them on.

Speaker 1:
[53:19] So you mentioned it was a 250, you get the standard console plus the one chunky, you know, arcade Neo Geo joystick controller.

Speaker 2:
[53:27] Right.

Speaker 1:
[53:28] So that's a good deal for the pair, and this is especially why. They came out and basically said, this is not FPGA and it's not emulation. You know, they're going back to the original ASIC chips and producing them for the most accurate way. Powered by legacy ASIC chips. Re-engineered by modern standards to accurately replicate the original machine's hardware and software. The system natively plays game software from both new and old game cartridges for the most authentic experience. Not emulation, not FPGA approximation, but true console reincarnation etched back into silicon. Okay. One of the first things I thought when I saw this, like, wow, if they're really doing the original hardware, they're never, they're going to lose so much money, it's not even funny. If they have to go back and re-replicate the chips exactly how they were 35 years ago, that tech is dead. It's gone. You have to pay R&D in order to redo these chips. Even if the actual chip itself, you have to redo all the architecture. This is a concept that would cost millions and millions of dollars. To R&D and then produce it on top. This would be unfathomable for a company to do it. I thought, okay, well, it's Saudi Arabia doing this, basically, so they can take a loss, but why would they? But we'll get into that. But I talked to someone that knows more about this than I did, and they thought that, okay, what's the best way to do this that makes this make sense? You have a Mr. Core that exists, FPGA Core. That Core is based off the original chips. So, okay, that makes sense. So, what can you do? You take the architecture from the modern FPGA, and you then basically retroactively put it on the original ACIC chip.

Speaker 2:
[55:22] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[55:23] You're basically recreating the chips infrastructure from the modern version that was replicated off the original.

Speaker 2:
[55:30] It's like you make an imprint and then you're casting a mold off of that imprint.

Speaker 1:
[55:35] It's not 100% of the original, but it's going to be pretty close.

Speaker 2:
[55:38] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:39] And by doing that, they told me...

Speaker 2:
[55:40] It's just cool.

Speaker 1:
[55:41] By doing that, they told me the ACIC chips are a hell of a lot cheaper than getting the FPGA core into these. So, it's like, okay, you are getting rid of all the R&D that you need that would cost you a ton of money to do this, if they're making them in 90, and now it's cheaper to produce because these chips are a lot cheaper than the guts on, say, on an analog console. I'm like, okay, this is really smart that you can pull this off. I'm like, okay, I'm sort of into it. So, they have their 250 package with the joystick. That puts it over the top, because they're charging $120 for just a joystick. This makes this the cheapest, or I would say cheapest, the best value on one of these modern old consoles. We've seen it in forever.

Speaker 2:
[56:34] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[56:35] Because of that, I think. Would you agree?

Speaker 2:
[56:37] I would agree.

Speaker 1:
[56:39] So, they have that version. They have a white version.

Speaker 2:
[56:42] They call it anniversary.

Speaker 1:
[56:44] To me, is it the same thing? It's just white? It's $350 if you want to... I mean, I do it with the books. I have different colored books, covers, if you want. But the white stick is only $120 as well. So, you're paying extra money just for the white console. So, that was interesting to me. They also have, though, a bunch of other things. They have the wireless gamepad they're doing. That came out of the CD console.

Speaker 2:
[57:09] Yep. And people like that for the thumbstick on it. They're also...

Speaker 1:
[57:12] The clicky thumbstick?

Speaker 2:
[57:13] Yep. And they're also putting out 10, well, basically reprinting, reproducing 10 games. The games are 90 each, which is by any measure, all of these games are more expensive than $90 if you were to buy an AES version. The English AES version of Metal Slug is so expensive and so hard to find that you can basically not find copies of it. They're almost all conversions of Japanese cartridges. And those conversions on eBay right now.

Speaker 1:
[57:50] Which one? Metal Slug?

Speaker 2:
[57:51] Metal Slug, 500, 309. Sorry, that was Shock Troopers, 499, 474.

Speaker 1:
[58:02] These are all Japanese ones.

Speaker 2:
[58:03] These are all conversions from Japanese to English, usually is what they do. They convert them into English cartridges with English packaging.

Speaker 1:
[58:10] Let's see a US one for 500, our best offer here. Is this actually a US one or a converted one?

Speaker 2:
[58:16] I would be surprised if it was...

Speaker 1:
[58:20] It says US, so that's one of them. What about, let's see, well, Shock Troopers goes for thousands, doesn't it?

Speaker 2:
[58:27] I don't know that it does, but I know, like I said, I think all of these are at least multiple hundreds of dollars at this point.

Speaker 1:
[58:33] Okay, that one's not thousands. One of these is thousands. Shock Troopers English 680 are best offer, English AES.

Speaker 2:
[58:43] Right. What's important is just the fact that these are all games that are multiple hundreds of dollars, and in some cases, thousands. King of Fighters 2002, Samurai Shodown V Special.

Speaker 1:
[58:54] That's the one that goes for a lot.

Speaker 2:
[58:55] Yeah, that's really expensive.

Speaker 1:
[58:57] Yeah, look up that one. I'll look up King of Fighters 2002. Yeah, once you get to those later ones, they were making some of these in batches of a thousand.

Speaker 2:
[59:06] Yeah, Samurai Shodown V Special English Authentic Complete $4,100. Free delivery, though.

Speaker 1:
[59:13] $1,000 for 2002, or best offer.

Speaker 2:
[59:16] So, $90 if these are well-produced cartridges, because keep in mind, these are heavy cartridges. These are big. They do have quite a bit in them.

Speaker 1:
[59:24] They're probably going to be flash cart versions, I would guess. That's cheaper to produce, but who cares?

Speaker 2:
[59:28] Sure, it's going to be a flash board, but it's still, at that level, probably not very cheap to produce.

Speaker 1:
[59:33] But, you know, those cases are nice. Like, they're replicating the cases the same way. Those are heavy-duty, whatever. They're like oversized Betamax cases and nice big manuals. That's a good value. It's a good value on that.

Speaker 2:
[59:48] Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1:
[59:48] Okay, so let's, for the record, just go through the 10 games offered here. You got Metal Slug goes for a lot. King of Fighters 2002, I just said it's like $1,000. Garou Mark of the Wolves, probably not cheap. That's a later one as well, I believe.

Speaker 2:
[60:01] Yeah, I mean, it's not cheap.

Speaker 1:
[60:03] Big Tournament Golf and slash Neo Turf Masters, everyone's favorite golf game. Shock Troopers, Samurai Showdown 5 special. Polestar, is that a shooter?

Speaker 2:
[60:10] Yeah, it's a good one.

Speaker 1:
[60:11] That's probably expensive. I never heard of that one. I never heard of Twinkle Star Sprites before.

Speaker 2:
[60:16] Another certified banger.

Speaker 1:
[60:17] Magician Lord, I love the fact that they're putting out the original pack in. That's just, to me, that's kind of classy to do that.

Speaker 2:
[60:23] I think everyone would expect it to. It's like if you do something in television and you don't put out Astro Smash.

Speaker 1:
[60:29] Sure, but even though most people are interested in the console, that wouldn't be the second or third game they would buy, but it's nice to have. And Over Top, which I haven't heard of either. I haven't heard of that either.

Speaker 2:
[60:37] It's a cool top-down isometric rally game.

Speaker 1:
[60:40] So if you bought all 10 of those individually, it'd be $900, right? So they're offering a package deal, a bundle, the anniversary edition, with like a nice little keepsake case that bundles everything and it flips up in the front. That's $1,000. So basically, that means you're saving, Pat may have, $250 plus $900, $1,150. You're saving $150 bucks. I mean, that's a decent deal. That's like, you know, over 10% off, if you want to get everything in one bundle. Is that an extra joystick too? Wait a second. Do you get an extra joystick with that?

Speaker 2:
[61:22] Like you get a wired and a wireless?

Speaker 1:
[61:26] You get an extra joystick.

Speaker 2:
[61:28] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[61:29] You get, because they have wired and wireless. You get the game pad. You get the 10 games. You get the rack. You get a bunch of these dongles and stuff. Okay. I'm not going to buy this, but you're saving hundreds of dollars for us buying these individually. You're saving like $300, $400. Like, okay. You know, the Saudis can lose some money on this. They don't care, I guess. That's why I keep coming back to you. Like, is this one of the things where it's like, hey, we want to just use the property and put this out there? Because I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[62:01] Right. And this is where it comes down to it. And this is what pains me because this is very appealing. If in a different universe where I wasn't moving, and this was made by someone else, yes, I would buy this. What kills me about this is what has killed me for years now. And it's that SNK is a very, like, one of my favorite video game companies, and they are 100% Saudi blood money now.

Speaker 1:
[62:33] Well, let's be 100% clear. This is PlayOn. There's a company producing this. So Neo Geo licenses to PlayOn, which used to be Coke Media in Europe. So, but either way, yeah, it's...

Speaker 2:
[62:44] It's all still, it's all still the same. And I can't get behind that. I can't do it. I am at an age where I can give up a toy for a stance, and it sucks because I am not going to lie about it. This is a very appealing package for the price.

Speaker 1:
[63:02] I like the fact that they're making memory cards. The fact that they're making memory cards, like, those are not ubiquitous, those memory cards. Like, that's pretty cool. Just the fact that doing that for the, like, that's like a community goodwill thing, almost. Because, like, how many people still need a lot of those memory cards? It's like, okay, you know, they're not, like, super rare, but, like, put them out there. More people could have them. If you're an arcade owner, it'd be nice to have a couple more memory cards. Like, that's a cool thing to do.

Speaker 2:
[63:25] Yeah. I just think all of this, all of the pandering, all of the pricing, it's all done in a-

Speaker 1:
[63:31] Pandering the pricing, okay.

Speaker 2:
[63:33] Well, all the pandering and the pricing, I think it's very much, it's like they said about Saudi Arabia and the comedy show.

Speaker 1:
[63:41] Well, yes.

Speaker 2:
[63:42] And the golf, it's, it's, it's, it's-

Speaker 1:
[63:43] Live Golf, which is shutting down, by the way.

Speaker 2:
[63:45] Oh, thank goodness. It's all just money spent to launder their image.

Speaker 1:
[63:52] WrestleMania might be there next year. They've had a bunch about every year.

Speaker 2:
[63:55] Crown Jewel was when I stopped watching WrestleMania.

Speaker 1:
[63:58] Yeah. Ian, I'll give you one thing. Ian's pure, too pure sometimes to my taste, but he puts his money where his mouth is. He stopped watching WF almost immediately after they started doing the Saudi Arabia event.

Speaker 2:
[64:09] And do we slip? Yes. Do people pick and choose? Yes. No one's perfect, but when I try to take a stand on something, I really try to take a stand on it.

Speaker 1:
[64:19] No, like I said, I have an AES original. I have a Consolize MVS. I got some of those games. I might have paid 50 bucks for 15 years ago. So I'm good. I can always just go out and I have a multi-car. I never bought an adapter for the multi-cart, but I still have to buy that. Either way, I can play 90% of Neo Geo games if I want to with what I have.

Speaker 2:
[64:42] Yeah, sure. And you can play them on anything. I mean, none of the games that are being released here are games that have any issues with emulation. These are all games that you can play easily.

Speaker 1:
[64:56] Obviously, there's an FPGA core that's fine.

Speaker 2:
[64:58] A hundred other ways. And like I said at the beginning, this is meant for a very specific person who knows the games and wants to try to recapture that original experience. But it's not going to sell to a ton of people because if there's any company that has compiled and recompiled and ported and reported, it really leaves their games. It's SNK. You can play, I mean, honestly, from the Xbox onwards, you can play basically arcade perfect versions of so many of these games.

Speaker 1:
[65:33] That is true. When you said like, oh, Pat, the fighting inside have remained popular. Yeah, you're right. But how many people are playing them on the Neo Geo arcade game versus the past 20 years?

Speaker 2:
[65:41] Oh, well, that's what I'm saying. And I think some people may want to try to go back for that. But yeah, SNK is popular for its games, not for its system. This is only going to be for people who are like, now I can because it's not as financially restrictive.

Speaker 1:
[65:54] Yeah, maybe they're more curious. But even still, even if the price to me is still like a good entry point, $250, you get a joystick, you know, you got to spend money on the games. Do you want to spend, say you want two or three of those games out of those 10. It's $500. Like, is that worth it to get into the ecosystem? Could be. If you have that money, it's not cheap. Versus the alternates, like you said, like the SNK packs on all the consoles and things like that.

Speaker 2:
[66:20] Yeah, a billion ways to play SNK stuff. And that's why the Neo Geo remains in the public eye, not because people had it or really remember it.

Speaker 1:
[66:29] No, you have to be a rich kid.

Speaker 2:
[66:30] But people who play SNK games know that that was the system that came out.

Speaker 1:
[66:33] You had to be a rich kid to have it. The Neo Geo, what is the launch price? This is the podcast.

Speaker 2:
[66:39] I think it was like $750.90 money.

Speaker 1:
[66:42] I think it was a little less than that. US launch price. But it was shockingly expensive. $650. You were close.

Speaker 2:
[66:50] $650. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[66:51] $650 in 1990. Do you want to do a conversion?

Speaker 2:
[66:56] I'll do it.

Speaker 1:
[66:57] I knew one kid that had this. And I believe Ian was that same kid that had the TurboGrafx. That was the rich kid that lived like way down the road in the mansion that my friend Joey was friends with.

Speaker 2:
[67:08] $1,600 to $1,700.

Speaker 1:
[67:10] No one had this console.

Speaker 2:
[67:12] Well, it's funny because the only person I knew who had it also had a TurboGrafx and a Sega Master System in addition to the NES.

Speaker 1:
[67:19] They had a master system on top?

Speaker 2:
[67:20] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[67:21] I think I knew one person in the master system, I think.

Speaker 2:
[67:24] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[67:24] But no one even had them. So it was a rich kid.

Speaker 2:
[67:26] Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[67:29] So here's the other question that I bring up. This is where this has not happened ever before. And we're not going to count the Atari releases that are happening because they're kind of fundamentally different to what we're talking about. And Atari is not, well, Neo Geo is not the same company as Atari, but Atari has even gone through, I think, even more of a rigmarole of things. We have never been in a situation, I think, where you had one company wholesale say, we're going to start coming out with these 10 games, and all of these games at this point are cheaper if you buy the officially licensed one from us versus the ones that cost five to 10 to 20 times more on the used market. That, to me, is extremely fascinating to be able to drop these all in and see what would this happen to that market? Will it be all of a sudden people want to sell what they have? They bought it 10 years ago, and it was like a $500 game, and now it's a thousand. Would you want to sell for, now just get rid of it, and re-buy it for only 90 bucks? Or do you want to keep the original and just be like, well, this is the original, I love the original? How much does that damage in terms of cost? How much does that bring that market down, being that those games are not NES games? They're not even TurboGrafx games. There is a lot less of these games that exist in consumers' hands in the retro market versus other consoles.

Speaker 2:
[68:54] Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. I'm not convinced that it will shake up the market too much. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[69:01] Even for the one that's worth thousands, I'm trying to find one that was worth thousands.

Speaker 2:
[69:03] Well, here's the deal. Neo Geo games are such rarefied air that I think that-

Speaker 1:
[69:11] Is this a symbol sort of thing?

Speaker 2:
[69:12] Yes. I think for a lot of people, a $90 officially reprinted version of King of Fighters 2002 is going to be more than enough. But there's always going to be those asshole collectors. And these are things in such small supply that I don't see the price dropping on King of Fighters 2002. There's cache behind it being an original, when it's this small of a pool of collectors. And we don't have a lot of examples, but even if you look at something like, say, when RetroBit was getting real popular with their re-releases, and I was excited because they were re-releasing, they were releasing more expensive games at reasonable prices. So Metal Storm was one of them. And when it came out, I remember checking to see how much Metal Storm was on the NES, loose, it was about 120 bucks. And we got cheap copies of Metal Storm and people bought them. And when you look online, Metal Storm is still 130, 150, 165. It has gone up in price. So while I think it is good enough for people who can say, this is not a bootleg, and I get to play the game on original hardware, I still think there's collecting purists who are always going to insist on the original un-reprinted thing.

Speaker 1:
[70:34] Sure. Let me push back slightly. This is Neo Geo doing it.

Speaker 2:
[70:39] I'm aware.

Speaker 1:
[70:40] Yeah. So it's going to be closer to a one-to-one to the original, versus the Metal Storm that came out versus the NES one. So that's the thing where it's like, to some people's mind, this could be like, oh, it's the same product originally that I'm getting again. That's my only pushback.

Speaker 2:
[70:57] I think that really depends on what the final product is and how it stacks up side by side to one. And I think that just remains to be seen. I mean, you make a point there, but on the flip side, Neo Geo is so crazy that I just don't think that will matter.

Speaker 1:
[71:12] I guess, okay, I'll say this, because look, Polestar is 2875, 2875 or best offer for one of these, but another one is only 1200 because it says English AES. So I don't know if these are, like you said, are these a current change?

Speaker 2:
[71:25] They're very picky about region, and then there's also conversions in...

Speaker 1:
[71:30] Of a real Japanese to a US?

Speaker 2:
[71:31] Yeah, and there's also fairly effective bootlegs from what I understand of some games out there too.

Speaker 1:
[71:38] Oh yeah, we've talked about people get ripped off for five figures on a game. So that's the question. What happens then? What happens when they say, all right, we're gonna start putting out the games that are literally 20, 30, $40,000 games because they exist for the Neo Geo. I haven't even keep track of these the past years, but we're talking, these are games have to be, there has to be several games that are five figures, at least, I think, for certain regions. What happens when you put those out? I don't know. I honestly don't know. Like I said, this is sort of like uncharted territory with some of this stuff.

Speaker 2:
[72:09] Yeah. It'll be interesting. I think the whole thing is very interesting. I just think there's a big, big fucking rain cloud over it. Sure.

Speaker 1:
[72:18] We've had a couple of things happen with people we both know, friends of both of mine and friends with Ian.

Speaker 2:
[72:25] Times, they are a-changin.

Speaker 1:
[72:27] The first thing that we'll talk about was the 20th anniversary of the Cinemassacre channel, 2006, April 2006. So what happened was, it was the James Nintendo Nerd channel that Mike Mattei, James' partner and stalwart, pal, basically said to James, hey, we should make a channel, upload these AVGN videos that you had done previously, which at that point, I believe, were just a couple one-offs he did for like, we'll just shoot them and show your friends or whatever. Remember the original one was like Castlevania 2, I believe was the first one.

Speaker 2:
[73:05] That's just about the only thing I know about the angry video game.

Speaker 1:
[73:08] Don't kill me. I should know the second one. The Karate Kid was the second one. Originally, it was supposed to be like a trilogy of three. A list of AVGN episodes. I think I would know some of this. Here's the list on Wikipedia that maybe I show up in one of these. They actually had them by Seasons? Were they technically Seasons? Castlevania II was the original one, I believe, whereas the other one, you actually don't see them. Then they did Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that's right. Then Karate Kid. And that was supposed to be, I believe, like the trilogy sort of thing. Or no, it was Karate Kid uploaded for YouTube. Either way, you had 2004 was the first two ones, and they uploaded those two plus the third one, Karate Kid, on April 8, 2006. Okay, so it was a two previous YouTube, and then YouTube for Karate Kid. Then you're off and running, and they had one come out every month or so, until the end of the year. I discovered the videos around, I want to say it was August or so, I believe, or September. I want to say the first one I saw was probably Top Gun, or Friday the 13th, which would have been October of 2006.

Speaker 2:
[74:11] Where does Game Trailers fit in there?

Speaker 1:
[74:13] Game Trailers fits into the story, because James got on to Screw Attack early on. Craig saw the potential of James and hitched his wagon to him. Smart to do that. And then they had a bundle deal basically, like a content deal with Game Trailers. Okay, you take the nerd because he's part of us, and then you get our Screw Attack top 10 videos. That's basically what happened.

Speaker 2:
[74:38] I got it. I wasn't aware of exactly, I thought it was Game Trailers before YouTube.

Speaker 1:
[74:43] No. Then he really blew up. Because remember, Game Trailers was huge for like three, four years from like 2006, seven to like 2010, 11. It was gigantic. Yeah. Game Trailers was like the bridge between G4 to YouTube. It was like an in-between thing. Remember? I got featured on the front page of Game Trailers like four or five times.

Speaker 2:
[75:05] Well, the first time you did was the first time I had heard of it.

Speaker 1:
[75:09] And when that happened, I probably got like 10 times to 20 times more views than I would have got on YouTube. Easily.

Speaker 2:
[75:15] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[75:16] Easily. Flea Market Man, I think I told you what. That was on the front page, I believe, Flea Market Man this. Or was it? I forget. Some pathologist historian has to let me know. Flea Market Man has got 30,000 views on Game Trailers, when on YouTube it probably got like 200 or 300 views.

Speaker 2:
[75:33] That's just where the eyes were.

Speaker 1:
[75:34] Yes. I think it was featured, because they were probably like, what the hell is this idiot doing on a flea market? In 2000, that came out in 2009, that video. Anyway, back to the nerd. So James and Mike had a very nice podcast conversation for two hours. I recommend you check it out. It goes through some of the earlier trials and tribulations. For example, like, hey, how did we work around shooting in my small apartment? I put different posters on the walls for different shots and angles to make it look like it was bigger. Things of that nature. Talked about some of the fight scenes, like the stuff like, oh, like the Fighting Bugs Bunny is one of the famous ones. Mike gets in the costume or he's as a joker. So did you watch that video? Did you look at some of it?

Speaker 2:
[76:12] I did not see much of that. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[76:15] So the point is this, and I commented on at the time, and of course, a couple of trolls go after me for whatever reason. But I said this is like a huge achievement to not just to have a series go for 20 plus years, but to have a narrative character go for 20 years, and to have it go like that is to me remarkable.

Speaker 2:
[76:39] It is. I mean, you start looking at other examples of it, and there just aren't many.

Speaker 1:
[76:43] You run out after like Fraser Crane. Like you kind of run out, and that's like a big corporate Hollywood thing.

Speaker 2:
[76:52] Right.

Speaker 1:
[76:52] That existed for that long. You know what I mean? So, and to keep it where like he's still doing it, and people always argue about errors of the nerd being better or worse. Anything that lasts 20 years is going to ebb and flow and change.

Speaker 2:
[77:05] Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1:
[77:06] Due to your personal tastes as a creator versus who you partner with, anything. Due to your writing sensibilities change, and NES bung videos have changed in the past 17, 18 years. They went from one style to another to another. You know, me reviewing Three Stooges is way different than me reviewing Stain Events is way different than me doing the Amico Christmas. These are entirely different sorts of videos. So, yeah. So, it's sort of... Yeah, I don't want to say I'm proud of them, but like it's... Because I know...

Speaker 2:
[77:37] Yeah, you see your buddy do good.

Speaker 1:
[77:40] But it's like public that he even said like, oh, I was going to quit after the 100th episode.

Speaker 2:
[77:44] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[77:45] Now is that like 300 episodes or whatever? It's crazy.

Speaker 2:
[77:48] That's why I try to hesitate from making any like absolute statements like that, because it never works. It's never true.

Speaker 1:
[77:54] It's never true? We want to segue that earlier?

Speaker 2:
[77:58] No.

Speaker 1:
[77:59] But how many episodes is he even on? Does he even count like, oh, and this is a cute thing he did. He had a quote unquote lost episode that was filmed around the time of the early ones for Miracle Piano. It's like three minutes long, 45 seconds. It's basically like, I don't know what this is. It's not bad, but like it's Miracle Piano. It's like he couldn't make a full angry episode about it. No, but it's cool that that existed and they had it from the early, not VHS, the early DV recording. God, DV recording sucked. Pull the curtain back. Back then, you hated it. Oh my God, because you had to play it in real time to get it on your computer. You had to hit play on your mini. Even into early HD, it was like that. With the tapes, you had the tapes. I still own some of these tapes and it rolls. The tape rolls and it goes in real time. You step away from, that wasn't even Sony Vegas. Vegas or Premiere and it just has to come in in real time. This is even before the thumb stick drives came right after that. The flash drives came right after, like late 2000s. Before that, it was mini DV. How many episodes are we talking here? We got to be approaching 300. I don't have a solid number in front of me. Any other thoughts on it? I think it was very nice from the sit down and have the conversation and the fact that I don't know when the ride is going to end. I don't think it's any time soon. I honestly don't.

Speaker 2:
[79:25] I mean, all I'll say is, one, I don't think it's ending any time soon. I think that's going to keep going. I don't know a whole lot about the videos. I've always said for the 13 years that I've been doing this podcast or more, I don't watch YouTube videos. It's just not my thing. However, I have met James and I have met James at many points over the years. And the thing I will say about James is he always seems the same. I feel like he has done a pretty good job of keeping his head about him and just being a down to earth dude. And I think that's pretty impressive to be able to do after 20 years of success.

Speaker 1:
[80:07] 231 main episodes. That doesn't count the offshoots. That doesn't count the spinoffs. That doesn't count the NES Charity Marathon mini-sodes. That doesn't count the crossovers with me. Or anything else. Shoot, that is crazy. I didn't know that there's a Path of the Aeneas Punk subheading on the episode list. I had no idea. I literally have never seen this till now. So, okay, you had the top secret episode, the family game fun. Okay, so you have a bunch of those. The Biability Punisher two-parter. You've seen that. That's 12 years old this year? Holy shit.

Speaker 2:
[80:39] I have not.

Speaker 1:
[80:40] He appears, and then the Combat, which came out in 2019.

Speaker 2:
[80:44] Combat I saw. Oh, yeah, I did see. I did see Biability, yeah. Of course, I saw Biability.

Speaker 1:
[80:48] And then he had his recap. The last thing he did besides his cameo on my 15th anniversary was the 10th anniversary marathon in December 2020. I forgot about this. The nerd recaps his past appearances on the past charity marathon events. That was nice. And he was always great because James is so protective of the nerd character, and rightfully so, because all he has is a bunch of vultures around him, probably going back 20 years to do whatever. He was always so great with the marathon because those are always un-unlockable tier. Ben was like, reach 10,000 or 15,000, where then we'll show this three or four-minute video. That helped us a lot to get money for these charities.

Speaker 2:
[81:28] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[81:29] So the fact that I wrote some of them, and he would perform and I edited him, then he was cool enough to be like, hey Pat, I'll just write and shoot and edit it myself. I'll just hand it off. So we would go back and forth. Bubble Bobble, Sky Kid, River City Ransom. I would try to pick games that were actually good like Adventure Islands. I thought it was a twist on it.

Speaker 2:
[81:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[81:49] I did that. So here's to James and Mike and everyone else that helped out. Happy 20 years.

Speaker 2:
[81:58] And we also say goodbye to our friend, Norm.

Speaker 1:
[82:02] Well, not to him personally. Norm is fine.

Speaker 2:
[82:04] Well, Norm is fine. But the Gaming Historian has been part of Norm.

Speaker 1:
[82:09] I've lost some friends here and there, Ian, so we lost some folks.

Speaker 2:
[82:13] So just an interesting update and I think an interesting, what's the word I'm looking for? Dichotomy comparison. Yeah. But Norm has said goodbye. He produced The Gaming Historian from 2008 to 2026.

Speaker 1:
[82:30] Wow, 18 years.

Speaker 2:
[82:31] Yep. And yeah, I thought it was one of the, I said I don't watch YouTube videos, but I did actually watch a few of Norm's because Norm's YouTube videos were, they stood out from the rest, especially at the time where he was his most prolific. He had a more serious but entertaining documentary style videos with a lot of research done and they were educational and they weren't presented dry because he's very funny, but they were not as loud or brash as his contemporaries videos.

Speaker 1:
[83:14] Well, that's from his background, obviously.

Speaker 2:
[83:16] Sure. I mean, well, yeah, it's come from somewhere.

Speaker 1:
[83:19] Well, I mean, that's what he went to school for, for history. So I first crossed paths with Norms in like the earlier, you want to say Retroware, 1.5 days of like when I joined the site. In late 2009 is when I joined Retroware TV, and it was like Norm was already there. You had other folks on there already. A lot of these folks like Eric Lappi long retired from YouTube. Names people haven't heard of in a long time probably. These people that used to see at these conventions, MagFest, hung out at CES with some of these folks. And that's where a lot of us sort of intertwined those first years, those video game years, video game years, years of the 2011, 12, 13, the sort of the heyday of the site, things like that.

Speaker 2:
[84:07] Yeah, I think that really defined our core group, especially at conventions for a while.

Speaker 1:
[84:11] Oh, yeah. We were rolling like 18 deep, 20 deep in those suites.

Speaker 2:
[84:16] But yeah, that's where it all came from.

Speaker 1:
[84:19] So, and I had permission to talk about this because I got Norm's okay. I knew this was coming. And it's like when you know someone you're friends with, I'm your friends with Norm, I want to say good friends with Norm for like 10 years probably, maybe 12 years. Wasn't like really close to him for the first three, four, five years on the RetroWare TV days. Then we started seeing each other more, conventions, talking more. These, the stress and pressure, if people aren't in the production field or creating the entertainment, the stress and pressure of writing good content and producing good content and having a standard of quality that you personally adhere to and strive for and to do better over, not just 18 years, but even over a few years. I don't think people understand the pressure people put themselves under to reach that. Whether it's James, whether it's other people out there that put themselves through it. It's not, I don't think unless you're in this situation, you don't fully appreciate that. I don't think you can appreciate the stress and anxiety that some people take upon themselves in order to create these products. Besides the time and besides the effort and besides the creativity, it's a lot. Especially when you're like Norm or a lot of these folks in the past where you're mostly a one man gang. You're mostly doing everything yourself. And the fact that he could create such high quality things, it got better and better. And that's when like, I even told him, like when the Tetris thing, when he told me, Hey Pat, I'm putting out this Tetris documentary. It was at five years ago or so before. I said, well, how long is that? Oh, it's gonna be like 80 minutes. I was like, Norm, I said, Norm, I said, you gotta do it. I said, you gotta do a Kickstarter. You need help. Like you got, you like, you need, like, this isn't too much. You know, he's funding himself. He's, you know, he's getting the animations done. He's, he's doing, he's, sometimes he's flying to places. Like with Oregon drill, he's flying to places for interviews and for scanning documents. That is a lot of work for one person to do. And then have it be like 90 minutes, like quality enough to submit to a film festival or to be on streaming. That's crazy.

Speaker 2:
[86:42] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[86:43] And so I can imagine he can never see himself doing something more simpler. Oh, going back to doing like eight minute videos like I used to or 10 minutes. Like once you get to a certain point, it's hard to reverse that.

Speaker 2:
[86:54] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[86:55] It's hard to unwind.

Speaker 2:
[86:56] And I think it's also hard to manage the viewer's expectations too.

Speaker 1:
[87:02] I mean, I used to get pissed.

Speaker 2:
[87:03] You can grow what you do, but I think if you try to dial back what you do, not that there's anything wrong with that, I just think that that's going to be difficult.

Speaker 1:
[87:14] I think creatively you can't do that. Like it's just like once you reach a certain point, you can't go, you can't unwind it. It's like saying to James Cameron, I don't want to do avatar anymore, do a low budget terminator again. Like what? Why would I like I can't unwind that? I'm in a different space in my life, creatively, I'm on a different level versus back then. It's just, it doesn't usually work that way. It's very rare to see that. But Norm has been thinking about this, and again, I could say this. He basically told a group of us about him wanting to step away four years ago, in 2022, at a barcade. And at the time, we kind of, at least I did, I can't speak for the rest of the group, there was like six or seven of us. I kind of knew it because I know the toll it was taking on him putting out this content. And that's why I would get upset, not upset, but I'd be like, all the jerk-offs that'd be like, oh, this guy's only putting out one video a year. It's like, one video? It's a fucking feature-length documentary in a year. It's not a YouTube video. We're past that with some of these people's content, like his. So at that point, I kind of knew like, okay, well, he's told us, like, yeah, I'm thinking about stepping away. And at that point, it's like, okay, it's a matter of time. But he was working so hard on the Oregon Trail stuff, and I think he was finishing up the one before that. I think it was the Super Mario Kart one at that point. So, he starts this new podcast, is doing well with his wife, Christian, who is like the best person. She's amazing, the old tiny podcast. So once you get, it's hard to, once you're working on something regularly, that's all you know. Once you slip into something else that becomes like your full-time thing, the balancing act becomes harder and harder, I think, especially as you get older. I talked about in the podcast last time. It's harder to splinter up your energies, and I think, as you saw in the video, he admits like, oh, I took some time off. I visited some friends, say goodbye to Billy, unfortunately, and I started doing woodworking. I started-

Speaker 2:
[89:24] Yeah, you find new hobbies, and you find new passions in life as you grow older. No one is going to be passionate. Doesn't mean you won't like it. Doesn't mean that Norm's never going to think about video games ever again. It just means that it's time to put your effort into something new. And keep enriching yourself, keep enriching your life, keep learning and doing different things.

Speaker 1:
[89:45] And it's, like I said, it's not common, but we've seen in the past YouTubers say, oh, I'm done and they come back, or I'm taking a break and I come back. I thought I was very classy because I saw the video before it came out. I said it's very classy. It hits all the right sort of notes of like, you know, I'm stepping away. You know, I love, basically, I enjoyed the ride, but now I'm moving on to the better things. And it's very mature. I think that's a message that a lot of people should take to heart, that it's not a failing of you when you decide to move on from something.

Speaker 2:
[90:30] No, not at all.

Speaker 1:
[90:32] And that's one thing that I'll never forget. When he told us this four years ago, I'll never forget that, thankfully, almost all of us, with the exception of one person, that maybe one day I'll say who that person was, all of us were super supportive and saying, Norm, we love you. Whatever makes you happy, we'll support whatever you do. If you decide to do it, don't do it. It doesn't matter. It's all up to you. That's a great message for a lot of people to hear, because you should never be ashamed to turn the page and go on. You should never be ashamed. If that's what you're feeling, you do it. Don't regret it. Life's too short to regret it. And I feel like that's what I got out of that video.

Speaker 2:
[91:15] Life's too short to regret it, but it's also far too long to keep doing the same thing over and over again if you have other passions you want to go after.

Speaker 1:
[91:23] I think he proved he can do it. And I interviewed Norm on the Nuts and Common Podcast at this point. Was that four or five years ago? And he even admitted on the interview. He said, I hit a million subscribers, and I thought that would do something. I'd feel something.

Speaker 2:
[91:40] Right.

Speaker 1:
[91:41] But then he said, I didn't feel anything.

Speaker 2:
[91:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[91:46] At the time, I was like, yeah, well, it's arbitrary. It's like it doesn't really, it's a number.

Speaker 2:
[91:50] It's just a number.

Speaker 1:
[91:50] You get a plaque from YouTube when you hit a million, I think. I'll never hit there. I bet 250,000 for forever. But it doesn't mean anything personally. At least it shouldn't.

Speaker 2:
[92:02] No, it shouldn't.

Speaker 1:
[92:04] It's nice. It's a nice number. You know that people like your work, but like it shouldn't give you personal fulfillment that bleed into the rest of your life. And I think that was not saying that that caused Norm to make the decision. But I think that was like, what's the term I'm looking for? Not even a cascading effect. It was turning, not even turning point. It emphasized, I think, a direction.

Speaker 2:
[92:29] A moment of realization.

Speaker 1:
[92:30] Yes. I'll think of the word after the podcast I was thinking of. Anyway, so it's like congratulations to both for different reasons.

Speaker 2:
[92:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[92:40] To both James and Mike and everyone else that helped make the AVGN videos work. And to Norm for a fine career. And that's the best I can say on it, right?

Speaker 2:
[92:49] Yeah. I think that's pretty much it.

Speaker 1:
[92:52] All right, Ian, we can't go more than like three, four months without talking about this. Or else I think the lease for the podcast gets taken away.

Speaker 2:
[93:02] Believe me, we have tried to go longer than three or four months without it. So, a couple of interviews dropped.

Speaker 1:
[93:10] Dropped?

Speaker 2:
[93:11] Relating to the Intellivision Amico over the past couple of weeks. The intrepid folks on the Amico, Intellivision Amico Reddit found these, dug them up. And in our case, luckily, they went through the four-hour Phil Adam interview.

Speaker 1:
[93:33] And this, okay, we'll have to give credit to the interviewer and channel.

Speaker 2:
[93:37] Supposedly, it was last year.

Speaker 1:
[93:38] And they just held on to it for some reason?

Speaker 2:
[93:40] Yeah, it was, I believe.

Speaker 1:
[93:41] The Video Game Newsroom Time Machine.

Speaker 2:
[93:43] I'm split to it, but I think it was March to June of 2025.

Speaker 1:
[93:47] Which to me is telling.

Speaker 2:
[93:49] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[93:50] Was it an NDA?

Speaker 2:
[93:51] I immediately had questions as to why it had to wait so long. And then we also got an interview, a transcript of an interview from Hans.

Speaker 1:
[94:05] Hans was like the head of the European Arm of Intellivision to help them secure.

Speaker 2:
[94:10] He was basically the guy who got any of the games that they had that were close to finish or finish basically came from the German grant money that he hooked them up.

Speaker 1:
[94:17] Yes. He helped submit and say, Hey, we're a real company in Germany to get the money to do development on those several games. That ended up getting sold back to those companies.

Speaker 2:
[94:27] Yes. Yeah, they did. From BBG.

Speaker 1:
[94:29] Yeah, Shark Shark and Astro Smash. And what was the third one? There was a third one. Anyway.

Speaker 2:
[94:34] Skiing?

Speaker 1:
[94:36] Maybe.

Speaker 2:
[94:37] Possibly. So the Phil Adam, both of these interviews are interesting because if you read between the lines and you don't really have to read too far in between the lines of some of it, they both kind of throw Tommy under the bus in terms of what was going on at Amico at the time. However, Phil Adam had a lot of interesting things to say. And I want to point out that just the first and foremost, one of the things he said, which we all knew, was he blames the haters. Blames the haters still.

Speaker 1:
[95:17] Very mature for CEO to do, by the way. Very mature.

Speaker 2:
[95:21] Blames the haters. It's crazy hearing an older person like that use haters, you don't want to be taken seriously. A boomer.

Speaker 1:
[95:28] A literal boomer.

Speaker 2:
[95:29] And also blames Cancel Culture at 207 for closing the Start Engine funding camp.

Speaker 1:
[95:37] Okay. Just to reiterate, Start Engine was the fourth crowdfunding venture they had done after the pre-orders, Fig, Republic and Start Engine, right? Did I get the order right? I think that's the correct order.

Speaker 2:
[95:48] Honestly, I don't even know it, so I'm going to say yes, I think you're correct.

Speaker 1:
[95:51] Republic was definitely the third one, because that's where they had some success, and then Fig and you had the pre-orders. So that's basically... And that was gone within a week or two, because people were raising questions. And I think... Was that the point that the letter was sent from the SEC about the claims about...

Speaker 2:
[96:10] Yes, it was around then, because I remembered that...

Speaker 1:
[96:13] The guy who helped start the Xbox was working for us, and the government was like, what are we talking about?

Speaker 2:
[96:18] Because we read that, and what we did is we dissected that whole SEC letter on an episode, and we were like, there's no possible way that the money they're asking for is going to fix these problems. Like, they're screwed, screwed.

Speaker 1:
[96:32] Oh, yes. That's right. The start engine had the full document that has to be legally gone through. Like, you cannot lie in this document. Being like, yeah, we don't have money to function four months from now. We need this money because we have to shut the doors, let alone Ian. So we poured through that document. That's where we found out about the, was it the Ganesh loan?

Speaker 2:
[96:56] My big find was the $100 off the top of every system to go back to Sudesh Ergo.

Speaker 1:
[97:02] Sudesh, thank you. Not Ganesh. I'm sorry, Sudesh. The infamous Sudesh. We did 45 minutes pouring through that. That showed you just how terribly insolvent the company was. All their bad business dealings, because again, this is a document that you give to people to invest. Like you have to lay it all out, or your ass could get sued later if you're hiding things. Like you have to show, open your books up basically. So I was shocked that they did that because that showed how bad it was. And it was worse than what we thought it was.

Speaker 2:
[97:35] Oh, it was way worse.

Speaker 1:
[97:36] Like that loan.

Speaker 2:
[97:37] Reading through that was one of the most just... My jaw hit the floor every paragraph, every couple of lines.

Speaker 1:
[97:47] I forget some of the other points from it. Go back and search for our history. But the Sudesh loan was like six figures. And you're giving me a hundred dollars of every console.

Speaker 2:
[97:56] I think it was, if I recall correctly, it was $800,000 loan that Sudesh gave to be paid back with $100 from every system sale.

Speaker 1:
[98:06] It was crazy.

Speaker 2:
[98:07] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[98:08] Because you're throttling the lifeblood of your company. You're not getting any money.

Speaker 2:
[98:10] And Phil goes through this interview and basically just does not accept any blame for anything. And what I find fascinating is he's so focused on this fourth round of crowdfunding and how they were almost there.

Speaker 1:
[98:24] They weren't.

Speaker 2:
[98:24] And just completely ignoring the fact that that document was there for everyone to see.

Speaker 1:
[98:31] And they didn't have that much money. I think it was like single thousands of digits of when it got taken down. It wasn't a hundred thousand or a million dollars.

Speaker 2:
[98:38] Right.

Speaker 1:
[98:40] It wasn't a republic.

Speaker 2:
[98:41] I feel like it was like 10, 15. Who knows?

Speaker 1:
[98:43] It was small.

Speaker 2:
[98:44] It was small. It was 30,000.

Speaker 1:
[98:47] It was not five figures.

Speaker 2:
[98:48] I also recall when it went live.

Speaker 1:
[98:49] It wasn't six figures, I should say.

Speaker 2:
[98:51] You know, the fans of the system, the unreleased system, were talking about how it looked good the first couple of days because a bunch of people went in there and pumped in some money to make it look good, and then it just never moved again.

Speaker 1:
[99:05] So you want to go through some of these comments that are highlighted from some of these good redditors?

Speaker 2:
[99:09] So, yeah, I said the one, but the one that I like, that I want to make sure I mention, is the one where he talks about Breakout, the choice provisions breakout game.

Speaker 1:
[99:22] One of the few games that we said looked interesting.

Speaker 2:
[99:25] And I love Breakout and I like choice provisions, but the truth of the matter is that that's not a system seller. It's Breakout. At the end of the day, it's Breakout. So he was asked about the Amico breakout and what happened there. And he said he could make a stink about choice provisions, taking it to Atari.

Speaker 1:
[99:49] It was not an Atari release.

Speaker 2:
[99:50] But he won't. And it's just this weird old guy posturing, but he claims they paid in advance for the code. And the dev says, no, we paid our own money to finish it. Like it was never owned outright.

Speaker 1:
[100:05] I don't know what the contract says, but you can pay in advance, but there has to be something like, did you pay us for the rest of it? Right.

Speaker 2:
[100:10] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[100:10] And there has to be a provision for, what if your console never comes out? There has to be a provision for that. You don't own the licensing in perpetuity and for software like this.

Speaker 2:
[100:22] It's just so hollow because.

Speaker 1:
[100:24] Blame everyone else.

Speaker 2:
[100:25] They are in financial. Amico Entertainment is just financially screwed. I mean, obviously. And if you could really take someone to court for that, you would, but you can't. So you won't because you don't know anything about the legal system.

Speaker 1:
[100:40] Well, there's other games that happen the same thing like the Gravitars games. Those folks.

Speaker 2:
[100:43] Graviators. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[100:44] Or Graviators. They were like in Sweden, I believe.

Speaker 2:
[100:48] That was the sports one, right?

Speaker 1:
[100:50] The sports.

Speaker 2:
[100:50] Space sports.

Speaker 1:
[100:51] The single-page like gravity of the balls and stuff.

Speaker 2:
[100:54] Single-page.

Speaker 1:
[100:56] Single-screen. That's single-page. Yeah. So like that, came out eventually on other consoles on Steam with different names.

Speaker 2:
[101:01] Yeah. Recently. Actually, it was something they checked on it. And this sounds bad. I'm not trying to knock the developers, but it automatically records your score into the high score list for any game that you play, any mode. And the online score list had 108 entries or something like that.

Speaker 1:
[101:25] Total, not unique?

Speaker 2:
[101:27] Total. So, well, it would be unique because it would be based on your Steam tag.

Speaker 1:
[101:32] Oh, it's all the same.

Speaker 2:
[101:33] It would be based on your Steam tag or your Switch name. So that means that there was like 110 unique players. We go back to the Google sales for like the Amico Home stuff where it's not, you know, they just give you a range. And I think we've all been guessing up way too high for some of these games on what they sold. These games sold abysmally. None of these would have moved any numbers had this system come out.

Speaker 1:
[101:59] How about this goodie where he said, this is from Revolutionary Peak 98, where Phil Adams said he deserved more credit and money for discovering Tetris. Remember, Phil Adams was at Spectrum Holobyte, and that's what the original Tetris computer game licensing was. And people in the comments are like, what did Phil do exactly with Tetris other than helping develop a version of Spectrum Holobyte prior to the Maxwell's losing of rights? The reply says, all the well-published stories about the origins of Tetris either don't mention Phil or just mention him as an exec at Spectrum who signed off on things at the most.

Speaker 2:
[102:33] This is from free credit report.

Speaker 1:
[102:35] Phil did not fly to Moscow and save him from the KGB agents. That dumb Tetris. That did not happen. Crossover. Gaming history and story of Tetris.

Speaker 2:
[102:47] Oh my God. Good crossover here.

Speaker 1:
[102:49] Mentions Phil one time. In quotes, Spectrum Holobyte president Phil Adam was in the UK looking at new titles when McConaughey showed him Tetris. He too became addicted. That was his role. Saying, Oh yeah, this looks good. Sign it. You'd be dumb not to. You don't get the credit for discovering Tetris when you weren't the one that discovered it. Well, you just said, yeah, this looks good. We should move forward. You'd be dumber if you didn't, obviously.

Speaker 2:
[103:13] And Gatorooz, an old favorite of ours, replies to free credit report that in the Tetris. So because he ended it saying someone said that Phil had the idea of suggestion to put Russian type music in the game, which if true is something, I guess. And apparently in the Tetris Effect Book, it says Adam did promote leading into Russian origins, but it was Gilman Louie's team that added the Russian folk music. So again, this is a guy trying to catch a bunch of stolen valor for being in the same company and an office somewhere doing something basically unrelated.

Speaker 1:
[103:44] I'm not trying to downplay the popularity of Tetris on the computer.

Speaker 2:
[103:48] No, not at all. It was huge. But it was the Game Boy.

Speaker 1:
[103:55] It was the Game Boy in the NES version that that's how 95 percent of the people discovered Tetris.

Speaker 2:
[104:01] I think honestly in Tetris' very specific case, I think it's the Game Boy more than the NES even. I think if there's-

Speaker 1:
[104:08] The Tang and Arcade version playing that too.

Speaker 2:
[104:10] Yeah, if there's one game that the Game Boy truly popularized worldwide, I feel like it's Tetris.

Speaker 1:
[104:18] If I had to put what made Tetris blow up on a pie chart, okay. The Spectrum hold by computer versions and other offshoots, 10 percent probably. You give 15, 20 percent to Tengen and their Arcade version, the Atari version, and then you give the other 75, 80 percent to Nintendo. That's probably what you do.

Speaker 2:
[104:36] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[104:37] So, not the downplay that people didn't have on the computer, but it was a weird thing where kids weren't playing probably Tetris on the computer until it became packed in with Windows in the 90s. Do you remember when there was a Tetris version packed in?

Speaker 2:
[104:51] Yeah. I remember playing the Spectrum Holobyte version and my mom getting addicted to it, but at that point in time, no one really knew what the hell Tetris was.

Speaker 1:
[104:59] Yeah. So, that's weird.

Speaker 2:
[105:01] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[105:01] What's the next thing on here? Oh, this is a quote. I didn't make those promises. It was Tommy. Blames him for the manufacturing contract and says the manufacturer screwed them at over 1 million deposit even though it was them Intellivision. They failed to be the terms of the contract. That's my paraphrasing, I believe. So, if you remember, in one of their videos, one of their handful of... I'm sorry, that was Beetlejuice's paraphrasing. I just copied and pasted it here. So, if you remember, in one of their promo videos, they brought in someone from ARK. Was it ARK Manufacture?

Speaker 2:
[105:34] Yes, and they did their weird promo talking about the...

Speaker 1:
[105:37] We're partnered with them to produce this.

Speaker 2:
[105:39] I remember those dudes looking like hostages, too. Like, they did not look... Like, this is not something that people do. Why are we doing this?

Speaker 1:
[105:46] So, in television, in their... No one talked... Someone had to say, what are we doing? Gave ARK, who was supposed to manufacture the hardware, $1.1 million un-refundable deposit that they fucking lost because I didn't enter production.

Speaker 2:
[106:09] Yeah. And again, I know it's just splitting hairs now, and people love to argue about it, but that's why I always say, it did not start as a scam. It started as a bad idea that was likely to fail.

Speaker 1:
[106:20] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[106:20] But you don't drop $1.5 million on...

Speaker 1:
[106:25] 1.1.

Speaker 2:
[106:26] $1.1 million on a deposit. Unless you're truly high on your own supply and believing that you were going to change everything.

Speaker 1:
[106:34] No, you're just not competent. You're not good business people. And yeah, you can blame Tommy for being, hey, but you enabled him. You allowed him to do it. You don't be yes men to a fucking maniac, Phil.

Speaker 2:
[106:54] Right.

Speaker 1:
[106:54] You have to have a board of directors to be like, hey, this is crazy. We can't move forward. Obviously, they were way too early to give up a million dollars. What were they doing? Were they afraid that they wouldn't get a line of production because of COVID? I'll take the risk and save the million, because it's a million dollars. Right.

Speaker 2:
[107:16] Businesses are supposed to be smart with the money. So Phil blames a lot of things on Tommy. But like you said, they enabled him. And I'm going to jump real quick just because it's a smaller interview and this could take hours if we let it. We could talk about this forever. Hans says, he's asked in this interview, one more thing, Tommy Taylorico. He's very emotional, sometimes confrontational. Do you think that hurt the project? So I'm just going to read this. Without Tommy, the project wouldn't have existed at all. He brought the team together, people like David Perry and others. In hindsight, sure, communication could have been more restrained. In hindsight, he sometimes promised things we couldn't deliver. So they admit that, and that's kind of where the little shove under the tracks comes from. But he then says, but he was also constantly provoked. He received threats, insults, things most people never see. Sure. I also don't think it was at the level necessarily that they said.

Speaker 1:
[108:20] You don't think Tommy brought that on himself by his public behavior?

Speaker 2:
[108:22] But his public behavior is what led to that. It's a chicken and the egg thing, and the actual genesis for that is Tommy started reacting to sane, normal, relatively soft-spoken criticism like an absolute fucking lunatic.

Speaker 1:
[108:41] And thought he could bully people because he used to do it on forums back in the day. He would talk down to people because he thought it was a big shot on a Canadian television show back in the early 2000s.

Speaker 2:
[108:52] And the way they all talk about him, they talk about him almost like you would talk about a child. Oh, he was a boy with a big dream.

Speaker 1:
[108:59] I'll say this. Yes, his friend David Perry got taken for a ride for millions of dollars. I think he put into the project. I don't know what the personal relationship is. They know each other forever. Obviously, he trusted his friend to do that. That's one skill set that's so divorced from being a CEO, like fundraising, getting investors. That's like salesmanship. That's not being a CEO. Yes, you can intertwine.

Speaker 2:
[109:27] Being a hype man is not a CEO.

Speaker 1:
[109:29] That's not.

Speaker 2:
[109:30] No.

Speaker 1:
[109:31] That is lunacy. Lunacy. We're proven right looking back. We knew at the time.

Speaker 2:
[109:37] And if you go through the Hans one, I just want to state again.

Speaker 1:
[109:40] I'm still on the film. You can go ahead.

Speaker 2:
[109:42] Cover and ground. He blames COVID just about 100%. Straight-faced. Hans did? Hans just basically blames COVID.

Speaker 1:
[109:51] Filled it too. Yep.

Speaker 2:
[109:52] And our friends in the Amico Reddit again, I'm not sure who it is here, but one of them points out again. Here they are. White pointer lists bullshit. List of video game consoles and devices released in 2020 to 2022. We did, but it's worth going through again real quick. The Evercade, the Evercade verse. Evercade got two fucking consoles out. Playdate, Polymega, Atari VCS, Analog Pocket, Steam Deck, Switch OLED, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. Both of which had faced issues. I think all of those probably faced little bits of issues, but they came out in that time.

Speaker 1:
[110:35] Polymega came out.

Speaker 2:
[110:36] Polymega came out.

Speaker 1:
[110:37] That was delayed like two years. And it was like they lost their funding, they had to go to another country, and that came out.

Speaker 2:
[110:43] Playdate, that's Panic, a smaller company. They did have to delay things because of COVID, but it came out still during that COVID time frame.

Speaker 1:
[110:51] Analog wasn't getting $17 million of investment for The Pocket.

Speaker 2:
[110:57] So that's all a bunch of boo-hoo and that can miss me. It was not.

Speaker 1:
[111:02] It's crazy.

Speaker 2:
[111:03] And then he talks about prices going up, and it's like, you were using an ancient phone board. And I think we actually talked about, I think one of the issues was the pricing started to go up because they weren't manufacturing them anymore. It was the end of life. And they would have to...

Speaker 1:
[111:20] They had to redesign.

Speaker 2:
[111:21] Exactly. Because they wouldn't be able to source the parts for their system because it was already based on old shit.

Speaker 1:
[111:29] The board.

Speaker 2:
[111:30] Six-year-old tech.

Speaker 1:
[111:31] Those screens probably were going to get harder to find. Those cheaper screens.

Speaker 2:
[111:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[111:37] I mean, we're just we're just drunken podcasters. But I mean, I don't think I could have done a worse console job. I think it would have come out with something eventually. I would have gotten something pushed out the door of me and Ian were in charge of this. Holy shit. Malicious haters as the downfall of the $10 million company. Now, you had your money, you had your chance. You let Tommy get away with bullshit. He hurt the rep of the company. He couldn't keep his mouth shut. He lied. He's lucky the SEC didn't come at him for lying about how complete the product was. He hired these shady business people in Florida to do the newspaper investment thing and to redirect towards the Republic in that video. They just fucking lied about the guy who made the Xbox on the team, and he was gone for like a year and a half at that point, remember? Just fucking lies and fraudulent activity at that point. Desperation. That's why. Plus, the product just wasn't good. I mean, back to Phil, unless you want to talk more about Hans saying.

Speaker 2:
[112:40] No, there's more in Hans. I mean, it's fine. We can just finish.

Speaker 1:
[112:44] All right, we'll look for things. They had a conversation about the controller two hours, 32 seconds into this. I was trying to talk up the Amico Home. He said, not that we didn't warn them about this six years ago, cost of goods for controller is not cheap. Close to $100 a piece.

Speaker 2:
[113:04] That is pure fantasy. Pure fantasy.

Speaker 1:
[113:09] That people would pay for it.

Speaker 2:
[113:10] Well, to pay for it, but judging by your notes, he's not saying that that's what it would cost for a person. He's talking about the cost of the goods for the controller.

Speaker 1:
[113:23] I believe that because it was expensive four or five years ago talking to people. It was like $60, $70 several years ago.

Speaker 2:
[113:29] I think the problem is, I don't think it was made with anything high-tech. The problem was all of the money they had to put into it for something that they couldn't truly mass produce at a high enough level because they didn't need it to bring the costs down.

Speaker 1:
[113:43] Well, no, it was a boondoggle. It was too many things in one controller.

Speaker 2:
[113:46] Yes, it was Homer's car.

Speaker 1:
[113:49] Yes, exactly. It was the Homer. It was like if you took out a lot of that stuff, the screen, you took out the gyroscope, you took out the spinning wheel, you probably would have taken the controller cost down by like $20, $30, $40.

Speaker 2:
[114:02] But you say it's a boondoggle and it is, but then you look at something like the 3DS with two screens, analog stick. It's got the gyrometer in there. It's got shoulder buttons. It's got Wi-Fi. And it was only, at one point, it was $150, $200.

Speaker 1:
[114:20] Well, Nintendo was developing in-house so that these parts, they were piecing parts together from all over the place.

Speaker 2:
[114:27] But that's what I'm saying. We have to take into account, it's not so much the actual stuff in the, because I'm sure a lot of that was, it was very cheap check. They were talking about one megabyte chips with the screen, like you couldn't actually do gameplay on it. It's the development. It's all the development they had to put into it.

Speaker 1:
[114:44] Intellivision is hacking these controllers from pre-existing parts, while Nintendo is creating the pieces. Over time, the cost comes, it's all the front load of cost of R&D, but then the cost per million of whatever, this and that comes way down while they're sourcing all across the fucking universe to some guy in Pakistan has one in a warehouse, and you got the last of these buttons left because no one else has them. That's why it becomes like lunacy to do these controllers, part of it. Those screens are just crazy. I don't know what the screen cost even or, and those were even not the original screens, they got cheaper, I believe. Originally, there were different types of screens.

Speaker 2:
[115:23] No, I think it went from a cheaper type of screen to a more expensive type of screen.

Speaker 1:
[115:26] Either way, what are we doing here?

Speaker 2:
[115:29] I think initially they were supposed to be, I don't remember the differences, but the reactive, like the kind on the original. The capacitive versus the garbage ones.

Speaker 1:
[115:36] Yeah. Then he said, the two self-charging stages is what made it different. I mean, I couldn't, you think people are buying consoles because of how they charge the controllers? You think that's why they're buying the console? That is truly, and I don't want to use it a bad term because a lot of boomers are nice. That's truly a fucking quintessential boomer mindset. Like, this weird convenience with either reason why you spend $250 or $300 for a console. Not to play the games, but to charge the controllers in an easier way. That's... What are we doing?

Speaker 2:
[116:13] Well, I think to a degree, that's just the mark of someone who's grabbing for straws. I don't know that he actually believed it, but I'm not trying to derail it. We've talked about the M64. It's that weird focus on stuff that doesn't matter because you're desperately trying so hard to find something that sets it apart. The one-hand eject, the two charging stations. It's all... These are not reasons people buy things.

Speaker 1:
[116:40] It's crazy. And then a little bit more. We could have probably went through this stuff more, but this is the high points, I believe, right? We're doing the same thing major. Hopefully, it brings more money for the console, meaning the Amico at home ship. We will come as... This is in quotes. We will come as close as we can to ship the console with the original pre-order cost, which would have been, I think, about $220 or $250. We can only refund so many at a time. That money's gone.

Speaker 2:
[117:08] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[117:09] In between, every once in a while, he'll probably throw in a little thing about, well, I wasn't getting paid much while I was working on it. It's like...

Speaker 2:
[117:14] He did.

Speaker 1:
[117:15] He got paid, but it maybe wasn't as much as Tommy.

Speaker 2:
[117:17] Oh, no, no, I mean, he does state many times that they... And Hans does, too. We weren't paying ourselves this, that and the next thing, and it's like, yeah, but, okay, maybe at some point, you stopped paying yourselves. How much did you pay yourself before you stopped paying yourself?

Speaker 1:
[117:31] I mean, did you get paid back in some loan interest? I don't know what some of these people were doing. We know some people were getting paid back in loans against themselves that worked in the company. We know that. It was in those start-agent documents.

Speaker 2:
[117:40] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[117:43] We didn't know how long COVID would last. He said California probably overreacted. You think California's response to COVID is what hurt you? You think that's what it was? Really? When all these other ones that Ian rattled off were developed during COVID and got these consoles out? You think Analog was concerned about everyone headed to the office? No. We get this stuff off and we work around with the rest of the world virtually.

Speaker 2:
[118:11] Grievances.

Speaker 1:
[118:13] How many other companies worked around COVID and produced products, whether it was hardware or anything else, by you work at home, you upload the ideas, you video conference, when you have to, you get together to prototype or communicate. But the fact that you were the only company that couldn't figure this out is very telling. Don't you think, Phil? Don't you think? Only you couldn't figure this out, the rest of the world figured it out.

Speaker 2:
[118:37] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[118:38] Just incompetence.

Speaker 2:
[118:39] And well, I'm sure, honestly, there probably were some other companies that didn't figure it out, but it was a matter of effort on their part. Not COVID was this blanket excuse. You look at, again, you look at Panic, that's a small fucking team doing the play date. Yes. They managed to do it. Evercade, small. The PlayStation 5 and the Xbox, X stuff, still good examples of things that came out during that era, but they're not the important ones. The important ones are other companies on their size level.

Speaker 1:
[119:09] Analog is not a giant company.

Speaker 2:
[119:10] Yeah, right.

Speaker 1:
[119:11] I mean, that's the reason why I kind of push back. I was like, analog is not this giant conglomerate. Yeah. And they're putting out these products and risking a lot in terms of like not cheap, these products they're making. So everyone found workarounds. Everyone had to deal with price increases or supply chain issues. It wasn't just your plucky Intellivision console. It's madness. I'm trying not to be over the top, but I don't like getting this energy, but you have to just triple hammer down how crazy it was. It is, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[119:50] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[119:51] And we didn't think it would get to that point. It went beyond our wildest dreams. We thought there was some...

Speaker 2:
[119:57] Oh, yeah. We never, ever predicted the end of this properly. We certainly, I don't think anyone predicted the end of it to be as dragged out and long as this.

Speaker 1:
[120:06] We gave it too much, I guess, on the surface. I guess we gave it, there was some level of competency, we thought, but I guess I did not totally understand how much Tommy, Tommy's bad decisions and everyone else around them not being enough of a babysitter to tell him no, and Nick, the CFO, signing these deals for these loans too. So like no one... Ian was an adult. What do they think, the vibes are going to get them through? I guess so. Where's the documentary? I pitched a documentary to an actual company, and they said, this is very interesting, but we would like this to end up in a lawsuit or something, to have an ending. This isn't good enough, this story isn't good enough, are you kidding me?

Speaker 2:
[120:43] I think it's honestly the most disappointing thing about the Amico Saga is we're not going to get just some big blow up end. I had hoped it's just gonna close out. John's just gonna fucking close the Discord one day, and that's gonna be the end of it.

Speaker 1:
[120:56] Tommy is putting on his tuxedos and playing in these weird backgammon tournaments.

Speaker 2:
[121:03] Where everyone gets a prize.

Speaker 1:
[121:05] By the way, we're three days away from the fifth anniversary of Tommy tweeting that I was gonna become the Coleco Chameleon of YouTubers, and he's gonna be looking forward to that.

Speaker 2:
[121:15] I hope he's still looking forward to it.

Speaker 1:
[121:17] Another list of the karmic ends of some of the foes of the CU Podcast that we've gone over a couple of times.

Speaker 2:
[121:24] Oh yeah, I forgot Tommy earlier when we were running through the list.

Speaker 1:
[121:26] I don't do Black Magic. I mean, it's just a track record. There's not really a foe of the CU Podcast that went on to larger fame and fortune and public adoration. I don't think it's happened.

Speaker 2:
[121:39] No, and I think it's just people who go after other people for clicks and views and drama are just going to succumb to that themselves. Tommy thought people cared enough about him that he could say things and we'd all get in line.

Speaker 1:
[121:57] Well, Tommy didn't go after us for clicks or drama. He went after us because it was part of his, as you would say, the secret. He could will our failure and his success into existence.

Speaker 2:
[122:07] Well, yes, that's how it started, but eventually it was to whip up the frothing adoration of his fanboys.

Speaker 1:
[122:15] Oh, to come after us.

Speaker 2:
[122:16] Yeah, and so he could get all the praise he wanted in his Atari age.

Speaker 1:
[122:20] To this day, I think we handled it more professionally than I think we could have and we could have went dirtier with Tommy. We absolutely could have had we chosen to with a couple other nuggets of information that I knew. But we try to have some sense of professionalism here and there. We're giving our foes probably more credit than they deserve.

Speaker 2:
[122:45] We were more professional than the CEO of a real video game company.

Speaker 1:
[122:48] We give these folks more grace, I should think, than they deserve sometimes. But there you go. There's our Amico update for the quarter. So we covered a quarter in the intro that's not been going well.

Speaker 2:
[123:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[123:01] We had fun, didn't we?

Speaker 2:
[123:02] We did. It was a good one. Lots of topics.

Speaker 1:
[123:06] I didn't mean to get up and say about Neo Geo thing, Ian, but I bought those games 15 years ago. I know exactly what I paid for them.

Speaker 2:
[123:11] Yeah. You've been inaccurate about the Neo Geo in the past, and I just wanted to rein in how cheap you were going to get with some of those games.

Speaker 1:
[123:19] I paid $50 for most of those games.

Speaker 2:
[123:21] And we had certain AES games that would go for $75 to $100, but even then, there was still a large majority of the library that was very expensive.

Speaker 1:
[123:33] Yes, but you can get those 8 to 10 earlier ones. Okay, shake hands.

Speaker 2:
[123:38] I'm a little sweaty.

Speaker 1:
[123:40] That's why I felt like I was not going to pay $100 for Super Spy, but I was going to pay $50. I bought Magician Lord, Super Spy. I should have bought Turf Master. I never saw Turf Masters in the arcade when I was a kid. That's why I bought Super Spy, Magician Lord. Those 5 or 6 earlier ones I bought. King of the Monsters, that wasn't super expensive back then. Baseball Stars 1 and 2, or just 1? I forget. I bought those 7 or 8 earlier.

Speaker 2:
[124:07] The first batch of 2 was far more expensive. No, not more expensive. I just think it was more standard. The first Baseball Stars in the arcade, in MVS, plays more or less like the NES game, whereas Baseball Stars 2 is real arcadey and real cinematic.

Speaker 1:
[124:25] More arcadey than the first one?

Speaker 2:
[124:26] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[124:27] I got to replay it.

Speaker 2:
[124:27] I haven't played it in a second while.

Speaker 1:
[124:29] But yeah, I basically bought that first batch of releases that came out.

Speaker 2:
[124:33] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[124:34] Did I buy the one where you turn into the beat-up, you turn into a wolf? Because I used to love that game. I always forget the name of that one. But yeah, those are the ones I bought back then. Anyway. All right. Well, we had fun. Yeah. Well, we'll follow our foes over the next couple of months. We'll see what happens. There's a lot to report on. We haven't talked a lot about that, really at all about the Smash JT lawsuit. I guess we'll wait till that gets to a closure, maybe, and that'll be worth going over.

Speaker 2:
[124:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[125:00] That's an absolute disaster class of how to act like a human being, obviously.

Speaker 2:
[125:04] Look it up and treat yourself to a little after podcast listening reading.

Speaker 1:
[125:07] It hasn't been a bad month or two for Schadenfreude on the CDU Podcast, I'll just say. See you later.

Speaker 2:
[125:13] Bye.