um there was a lot of um feeling back then that to make it make a game you'd take watch the skies and you would um rehash it as something else so you would still have the the team set up the same way you'd have the war map um you'd have some nebulous other game that that in watch the skies is the science game but it was kind of re-skinning it you know um and i i feel like there was a lot of that in the years that followed uh when shut up sit down did that video So when you decided to make this mega game based on Game of Thrones, what were you trying to achieve? Did you come at it from that perspective, taking what you know and trying to tweak little things thematically? Or did you have a totally different grand idea of what this game was meant to be?

Yeah, so I think a lot of the reason why so much mega game design more broadly is based on Watch the Skies is because for a lot of people that was their experience of mega games.

So there were the three massive games that were run in subsequent years.

which obviously had a lot more players than any other game.

So a lot of people, if they'd only played one mega game at that point, it was Watch the Skies.

And then there was also the video of it, which meant that anyone who hadn't actually played in one of those games, if they'd only seen the video, it was a video of Watch the Skies.

And I think when you start designing something, you do design based on what you've experienced.

Did those iterations start to trend away from those more war gamey mechanical things that you're not as familiar or comfortable with? Or what drove those iterations of the game?