Treyarch

So...

Infinity Ward, Beenox, Digital Legends, Activision Shanghai, Raven Software, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, and High Moon Studios.

Oh,

my God.

Yeah, it's everyone.

Because in the old days, it would be like Sledgehammer would do one, Treyarch would do an Infinite Ward, and they would cycle.

And you would kind of know which one you're getting.

Now it's all the same.

First started by Vincent Company, who would go on to do Respawn Entertainment.

And they also have the Black Ops franchise, which has been Treyarch's and has been kind of more, I don't know.

They've both been wildly successful and they both have different eras, as you know, where Black Ops is more kind of Cold War-y and a little more arcade-y.

And the Modern Warfare series is a little bit more serious.

They don't have any competition this year with the exception, obviously, of GTA.

But why is the comp battle Black Ops 7? Of the Call of Duty structure, right? Typically, it's Infinity Ward comes out with the best version.

Then Treyarch comes out with a pretty good, pretty close version.

And then there's the off year.

I love it.

Well, I think that's, we kind of lost that for a while where every, because it used to be that Infinity War, Treyarch, Sledgehammer, they all had their very own feels to their games.

Since Warzone, all the games kind of felt the same, to be honest, for better or for worse.

Black Ops 7 having that wall jumping again, I was like, okay, we can make a game that feels different again.

My guest today is an American writer, director, composer and game designer whose career has moved between some of the biggest studios in the games industry and much smaller, more personal experiments in interactive storytelling.

He worked as a producer at Treyarch, at Bungie and at 343 Industries on franchises such as Call of Duty and Halo before spending time at the University of Washington's Centre for Game Science, exploring how games might be used for research and scientific discovery.

He later joined Zachtronics, contributing writing and music to games such as Opus Magnum and Exopunks, while also creating his own interactive fiction.

In 2019, he created Eliza, a visual novel about an AI-assisted counselling service that explored automation and the boundaries between human empathy and technology years before those questions have become unavoidable.

did you did you sort of notice in your time working at blockbuster studios which you know we'll get into all of that later but i'm interested you know how much were you swept up into that sense of trying to create something great you know the next ocarina of time or whatever it might be

right i think uh Especially early on, I started basically when I was 20 years old.

And when I got to places like Treyarch and Bungie, I very much was swept up into the feeling and attitude of like, we really need to make something that really blows people away and is the best thing that anyone has ever seen.

And all of the stuff that came with it, the crunch time and the kind of strange psychological places you can get to when there's when you feel like an enormous pressure on you to make the coolest thing ever I experienced that and came to me and it was because I was taking it so seriously and I didn't I feel like I didn't know any better I was in my 20s and I was like this is it this is the thing that I do and we're gonna do and uh at the time like Halo 3 for example the noise around it and the hype that was building around Halo 3 was just deafening and it was like the idea that it would come out and not be anything other than just the biggest thing that has ever happened was just unthinkable And so that kind of expectation and that kind of feeling of, I don't know, it was like a feeling of doom that was hanging over our heads.