Where Do Video Games Go from Here?

Welcome to Post Games, a podcast about how and why we love video games. My name is Chris Plant and I'm so happy to have you here. Now I should be welcoming you to Mailbag Week, but sometimes news comes across my desk that I can't wait to share and I just have to change my plan. So while I still have a full Mailbag episode on the way, the news of the week segment in today's episode is sort of a mini episode unto itself. Sunset Visitor is a small game studio that created my favorite game of 2024, when Thousand Times Resist. That game imagined a sci-fi future in which a single teenage girl survives a global pandemic and her clones, many generations removed, grapple with what it means to be alive. It is about COVID, diaspora, being an immigrant, being a teenager, and being a human, which is to say, Sunset Visitor makes games about the moment. This week they announced their next game, Prove You're Human, another game grappling with the anxieties of the present. This sci-fi adventure asks the player to convince an AI that she isn't human. It looks awesome. For help, Sunset Visitor teamed up with Black Tabby Games, the developers of hit narrative games Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow. The team at Black Tabby have actually expanded into video game publishing with Prove You're Human, being their first publicly announced project. I talked with members of both teams about how Prove You're Human came to be and why it is time for a different sort of AI story and a different sort of way to make video games. But listeners, let us not forget the mailbag. Y'all have asked fantastic questions and I've split them up into three parts. Act one, how I tell stories about video games. Act two, where video games go from here? Patreon bonus, getting into the weeds of video game culture? Act three, the news of the week, that interview that I just told you about. It is another week and another big episode. Let's get to it. 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I love being able to put something on for a nice evening out if I'm going to dinner or the movies with my wife. Listen, I'm a gamer. I'm not used to trying to impress people and it's nice to look nice and it's even nicer to do it and not feel like I'm spending all of my money. If you are looking to do that too, you can refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to qince.com slash post games for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash post games. Act one, how I tell stories about video games. This question is from Jamie. I enjoy engaging with video games and gaming culture in nearly every facet and yet, when someone asks what my interests are, I'm still uncomfortable saying video games. What do you think that is? It feels like games have broken through many cultural barriers, but are they maybe still not at the same level as other media? It's cultural fragmentation to blame. Or do I just need to build more self assurance? I would say all this is part of the goal of the show, part of why we struggle to talk confidently about games is because we still lack the basic vocabulary. Like compare games with film. Everybody knows terms like a scene or a shot or a camera. And if you look at a book, we teach literary terms in school, right? But with games, everyone is on a slightly different page in terms of their video game literacy. And on top of that, games are just so broad. Like when we say games, we mean all interactive media. It would be like if you said books, but you meant everything from poetry to fiction to nonfiction to newspapers to magazines to anything text. I just think the term for games is so broad that it makes it really hard to know when we're talking about games, if we're talking about the same thing to one another. The truth also is that at this point, everybody likes their own ultra niche thing, which is why so many people now identify as nerds and they're like, oh, I'm a nerd for gardening or I'm a nerd for cars. For that reason, I think it's good to both find your people and also to show curiosity on what's beyond your interest. Honestly, the best way to experience games is to have people who you chat with who really get them and to have friends and family who don't know anything about them and want to talk to you about something else entirely. Hey, Chris. My name is Jacob. I just listened to the resties episode where you talked about Reloaded and it made me wonder because you interviewed them and we're having a great time. I would just think that if I interviewed somebody and had a really great time, it would make it really difficult for me to talk about the things I sincerely actually didn't like about their game or shortcomings. I'm sure as a journalist and I'm sure in past jobs and things like that, sometimes you got to do that and sometimes that's the thing that I guess I just wonder at this stage of your career is any more or less hard? Is it a thing that you try to be conscious of? Maybe I'm just a softy that can't hurt anybody's feelings, but I would be curious to hear where you're at on that. Honestly, I have a bit of a cheat for an answer. There is an abundance of games and this more or less solves the problem for me because I have the freedom to choose things that interest me and that I think are, if not good, at the very least compelling. For post games, my goal, I say it in the intro each week, it is to explore how and why we love video games and how and why might seem kind of like cast aside, but there is specificity there. I chose them for a reason. How is the exterior? It directs us to understand how things work, how they come together, how they fit into the world. Why, for me, is an interior question. Why do we play games? Why do artists make them? Why did a creator make one decision over another decision? And why does that decision resonate in our minds or our hearts? Or why does it not? These are also questions that, quite frankly, align with my work as a critic. So I often find, like I said, that the two flatter one another. Post games and besties end up being a really nice match because sometimes for besties, I'll be playing a game that I find really exciting and interesting that surprises me in some way. And then I have to go get the questions answered about it. Or the other way around, I'll be interviewing somebody for post games and suddenly I just need to play this thing that they're telling me about because it sounds so new and expressive and beautiful. The answer, I guess, in short, is I just skip things that I don't find very interesting. Like I said, a bit of a cheat. Hello, my name is Alex. My pronouns are he, him, and I'm just wondering if you had any plans of doing a field trip episode. Here in Rochester, we have the Netru Zima Play and it has a sweet video game section. And I know it's been mentioned a couple of times. And it would be cool to see your perspective of an on site reporter style podcast. So thanks so much. Will I do a post games field trip? Yes, absolutely. Once the show is more financially stable. Right now, in terms of where I can spend my budget, the answer is basically my family. It's like pay our insurance and meet our bills. But yeah, I need to build up the business more before I allow myself to spend it to go and do these things. That said, I think that's like in the next year. I think that's a 2027 sort of thing. I would love to go to the museum of play. I really want to get back out to Tokyo Game Show. I have a whole series of stories just waiting to be done with developers out there once I can get out there. You hopefully will see me on the road sooner rather than later. And wherever I go, I will try to let listeners know and hopefully we can do some meetups because I think that would also be pretty, pretty great. This one is from Eddie. In an attention economy with a rising abundance of great games available, but a thin and amount of time and customers, how do you decide as a journalist what media is worthy of your limited attention to play and consume either for work or just for leisure? Eddie, great question and relatively simple answers, which is, is the game genuinely fun? And the game doesn't have to be fun, but it certainly helps. Fun matters. I don't want people to run away from the idea of a game being fun because it doesn't have that prestige appeal of a game being intellectually interesting. Most games are meant to be fun in the same way that most cinema is meant to be enjoyable to watch. Very little cinema is actually meant to aggressively challenge you, is meant to put you off. Even like heavy dramas are meant to be structurally engaging. They're meant to latch into our brains in a way that is appealing. So that is something I think about. Is the game fun? Is it providing me some sense of joy? And will I take something away from my time with it? And that could be that I just feel a little bit lighter after a hard day. It could be that it got me to think about something that I hadn't thought about before. Could help me process something that I'm in the middle of, which also gets to the question of will it move me? And that's really broad, but that's my favorite thing that a game can offer, where after I play it, I feel different. I feel like I need to rush to tell everyone about how it changed the very way that I see the world. Even if only a little bit, a tiny change of how you see the world feels profound. Related to that, does the game connect with the world? Does it reflect it in some surprising way? There are a lot of games that are like not fun. They take time from me rather than give me something and return for it. They don't move me or affect me. They have nothing to say about the world. They don't reflect it in any interesting way. They exist purely to distract me, basically. And those are the things that I generally try to avoid. There are some exceptions because I think I should be aware of those games, but that's just not where my interests lie. And selfishly, it's just not good for my job as a journalist. Talking about those games makes for pretty bland criticism. And investigating them makes for really bland reporting or interviews. It's like the answer is I designed this to exploit people's brains so that they would just keep playing it. We should all be aware when it's happening to us, but it makes for a pretty boring story. Hi, Chris. My name is Kyle Heahim. You've made reference to your conversation with CTNN in multiple episodes, maybe every episode since recording it. It's clear that the conversation and book have made an impact. And as a listener, it's interesting to see you connecting all these different aspects of games and play across multiple topics. Without giving too much away about potential future episodes, are there questions that these conversations have thrown up for you that you'd like to explore? And if so, what are they? Thanks a lot to show. I can't name a specific question that will inspire a future episode, but I am noticing a few themes that are running through the work I've been doing this year. Those are how do we measure the joy or the value that we get from games? What are they doing for us? And I think it can be a trap to think that games importance is like, oh, it really was intellectually valuable. There's valuable and just play, which we mentioned CTNN. Now I'm mentioning him in another episode of the show, but I think that idea of respecting the value of play and what it does for us is a recurring theme. I think the growing influence of tabletop on games, another thing that we talked about in that episode and in the episode with the designer of esoteric ebb, tabletop allows not just player freedom and agency, but a improvisational storytelling. I think that's going to be visible not just in how we play games, but how people design games moving forward. And I think you'll see this, this last one a lot in future episodes, but questions around both the benefits and the dangers of nostalgia. I have a whole series of episodes coming up that are doing a bit of a tap dance around questions of nostalgia. And I think you'll see some interlinking between those episodes. I want every episode to work on its own, honestly, but I do hope that these little connections reward folks who tune in every week and can hopefully feel like there is a larger project really every year or so. I think last year that project was the year of too many games. And I think this year we're still kind of figuring out what the conversation is. Act two, where video games go from here? Next up, I actually am jamming two questions together. Let's get to both of them. Hi Chris, my name is Ian and first off, thanks for making post games. It really scratches the niche for these deeper dives into topics that I care about. So I want to get your thoughts on something I've been reflecting on. For the first time in decades, the game companies don't have a guaranteed money making trend to chase. MMOs and free to play are risky, games as a service feels like it's on life support, and anything AAA takes at least six plus years and a quarter of a billion dollars to produce. Now at the same time, we're getting an overabundance of these great smaller projects that explore some really cool ideas and feel completely unique. And I personally would take these over a new call of duty any day. But I also know these smaller games rarely grow the bottom line for corporations or get people to invest in new hardware. It makes me wonder, will these games be enough to sustain the industry? Or will we have to find the next big thing to make a bajillion train of rolling? Thanks again. A few years ago, I was asked about the future state where the industry has stabilized. What does that industry even look like? How long did it take to get to that future state? What happened along the way? And if you see a few different potential futures, then what could nudge us toward one versus the other? I'm wondering especially if you see the Steam Machine or the MacBook Neo playing special roles in getting us to one of those future states. Say for instance, where we're all Linux gamers or maybe we're all retro gamers. Thanks very much. Why are these two questions tied together? Let's talk about the first question. All of this going on in the games industry, is it sustainable? And will we have to find the next big thing? No, it's not sustainable. And no, I don't think we need to find the next big thing. I believe that we are entering a new normal for what constitutes the video game industry. In the past, the games industry meant a handful of large video game publishers that produced many games a year and distributed them through a controlled brick and mortar supply chain. Every piece of that is broken. Studios ambitions got too big. They kept purchasing this nuclear arms race of video game development to the point that they're shipping maybe a game or two a year. Brick and mortar is all but dead. And distribution is available to nearly everyone online, which is great because everybody can participate. But it also means this kind of monopoly, not just of games, but of our minds and our collective interest. That's just gone. And yet games clearly are not dead. Like, not at all. In fact, I think games have never been better. The diversity of games, the abundance of games, the quality of games. And I think that's especially visible if you have access to a PC, where you can play a lot of this stuff that comes out there first, or maybe only comes out there, because it costs a lot of money to port it and get it to other systems, get it approved by all the parties that need to approve it. I think I can apt comparison for me is media. So we had news reports on the radio and we had newsreels at movie theaters and we had newspapers and we had magazines. And then eventually we moved on to blogs. And now we have web video that tells the news. We have so many different options and news never died, but it changed to match its formats. And it can feel in the process like the thing is dying. Because basically it's like shedding its skin and that looks grotesque and it can be painful and it hurts a lot of people and it can even hurt the form. But the thing itself doesn't die. So games is going through this weird molting. It is horrible and atrocious. And I think the industry will certainly operate in a very different way, but in no way is it going to die. Then to Noah's question about a stable industry, in some ways I suspect it looks a lot like what we have right now, perhaps like minus some of the biggest players. But here's another comparison, the music industry. And I talk about this on the show quite a bit. The music industry fundamentally changed with the internet. On one hand, every local band could reach these massive national audiences. On the other hand, there wasn't a system that played taste maker and decided that, hey, these set bands are going to be big. They are going to make not just a living, but like they're going to be celebrities off of it. That apparatus is just much smaller than it has ever been. And at the same time, there is more music available to you now than there ever has been. The artist changed their expectations. Most artists do not expect to be a massive star. I would say most musicians on average don't expect for it to be their full time job. That is trickier for games. I don't think that kind of epiphany, that collective epiphany has really happened yet. I still think that there is a broad belief that if I make a great game, I will be successful. And sadly, I do not think that is true now. I think making a great game increases your odds of being successful, but so many other factors play into a game's success. The one other thing I'll add to this is for y'all, especially if you're not a video game developer, the best way through this period is to focus on the art itself. And that doesn't mean like, don't be compassionate and don't have empathy for video game developers. But when you are enjoying a piece of art, enjoy the piece of art. And I'm very flagrantly just stealing these beliefs from Meredith Gran, our guest on the show, who talked to us about Perfect Tide station to station. Her point is the people it reaches and impacts and affects, that's what matters. That's the point of the art. And I think that we really are at a risk of that getting lost. And I know with my show, I try to do both at times where I'm trying to give you the industrial perspective. I really want to make sure that I never guide you too far away from what matters, which is the things these people are making and how they change us or influence us or inspire us or infuriate us. Any of those things are so much richer than the questions of a spreadsheet. Hi, Chris. I'm Kat Sheeher, calling from your home state of Missouri. You've talked about accessibility on the show and games today are more accessible than ever before. Why, though, have we not seen a similar boom in accessibility with gaming hardware? Controllers all kind of look the same. I've never seen devices that assist with mobility or any other gaming limitations, except maybe like in sci-fi novels. Accessibility built into games is important. It makes sense. But it also puts the onus exclusively on game designers to understand accessibility and implement it. What would external accessibility devices look like? And what would it take for them to be developed and sold on a large scale? Thanks so much. Love the show. I have good-ish news, which is accessibility controllers do exist, but there hasn't been a lot of new work done by major corporations in the past few years. So the Xbox Adaptive Controller remains one of the best options in terms of, I'd say, both inventive and malleable adaptive controllers by a major company. There are other pseudo options. I think it's called the Azaron one-hand keypad. These tools, especially the Xbox Adaptive Controller, allow you to plug in other devices to change the way that you create inputs for your video game. But yeah, there's not, from what I can tell, a lot of new stuff coming from Sony or Nintendo or Xbox or the big controller accessory players. This is more of, unfortunately, something being catered to by a niche more like cottage industry. And I hope that changes. I hope that these companies are not incentivized to come back, that they choose to come back because it shouldn't be about financial incentives because that's not what this is for. Creating equity doesn't always match with capitalism. So if we want better accessibility, these companies need to choose to do it because it is the right thing to do. That obviously is not something I always expect from a company that is deeply concerned about its bottom line and not much else. I do want to shout out two other things, which aren't quite answering your question, but I find really interesting. And they are the next playground and board. You can find board at board.fund, B-O-A-R-D. The next playground is basically a Microsoft Connect as like a little cube and it has its own games and you can plug it on onto your TV and you can just start playing Connect style video games right away. And I believe it has a subscription service for it. It's really interesting in how it does what the Connect set out to do. It strips away all the expectations of how to play a video game with a traditional controller. And then the board has just personally been really exciting for me. And I should be very clear here, the people at board sent over a unit for me to test. I'm doing an episode on board and educational games later on, so you'll hear more about that later this year. But the board is basically a giant tablet, like imagine a humongous iPad and you play a mix of board games slash old fashioned arcade games, think like Lemmings or Asteroids, and you control the board by putting actual tactile tabletop board game pieces onto the screen. And those pieces can be like a little ship for Asteroids. They can be blocks, like three dimensional blocks. In the Lemmings game, the Lemmings will like climb up them. So it's used them to build the world that the Lemmings navigate. And for me in accessibility, this one has hit home because my son is neurodivergent as I've talked about on the show before. And traditional board games, both don't interest him and don't really match his way of engaging with the world, where the board has been an incredible boon. It has been absolutely fantastic in giving him a way to interact with multiplayer, what would normally be a tabletop game together. And just extremely grateful for that. I guess the way of putting it is accessibility can mean a wide variety of things. And I think it's good that we have a wide variety of ways to play and game types to serve as broad of an audience as possible. Hey, Chris. My name is Patrick Mulligan. My pronouns are he, him. I'm a traffic manager for a public radio station, which often has me thinking about how advertising works in media. And I was just wondering, how do you think product placement works in video games? I know it's a pretty big industry in movies. And I'm often looking for the moment when a car pulls up and it's obviously a product placement for BMW or Mercedes. I'm just curious, how do you think that works in the larger scheme of video games? So product placement in video games, I think has a long, strange history. In the 80s and 90s, we had entire games that were basically ads unto themselves. We had the Avoid the Noid Dominoes video game. We had Cool Spot with 7 Up, ChexQuest, which was a free doom-like video game inspired by Chex, the family, the children's, I guess, cereal. And then in the 2000s and the odds, product placement could for the first time be added and removed post-release through patches. And that is when we had like the Obama ads and Burnout Paradise. And now, I think product placement is most often tied to skins in places like Fortnite and Roblox. These are partnerships between these major corporations. And the thing that kind of connects all of this is the target audience. Product placement is a tracer die that leads us to wherever the youth are, whichever generation it might be, and what is like the easiest and fastest and lowest cost route there. I think that's unsurprisingly why we see it in a place like Fortnite and Roblox, because they don't have to make full games anymore. Maybe they don't even have to pay as much if it's like a mutually beneficial partnership between the corporations. And these places just have massive audiences of young people. It is where they are gathering. So I think that's like what is going on right now. Obviously, there are some exceptions. Resident Evil Requiem, as you kind of hinted at, had some high-end car product placement. But the thing that kind of runs beneath all of this and has been pretty consistent since the early days, is product placement for weapons and their manufacturers and their designs. But I'll be very real with you, that is like a whole episode that we will need to do sometime else when we get into just how much video games have normalized our understanding of exceptionally deadly weapons, of military weapons. I can spiral on this forever. I'll save it for another episode. But I hope that generally answered your question. This one is from Snorehorse. It feels like the games industry is in a pretty dire place, but what releases or developments or ideas make you most excited about where games are going as a medium or as an art form? Who is making work that feels like it could only exist now in games? Thank you for the great question. This is like a really trite answer. I apologize in advance. But everything that has been on the show is what thrills me or excites me or like I need to know about. I have never felt more in love with the medium of video games than I have this past year. And that is because I am talking to all these people who I feel pushing against the boundary of what a game like quote should be. And that can be Danielle Brathwaite Shirley putting games into art museums that challenge people and hope to make their lives better. I think this is Siji Nguyen with ideas about play and how we bring play back into our lives and maybe remove some of those gamification or just techno structures. I think the games themselves, like just in a very basic sense, are cool and like fun. I think Perfect Tide Station to Station and Memoir Games are really intellectually exciting. That is what keeps me going. They are filling my cup spiritually and intellectually and then they are also just fun, which I don't think should be lost when we talk about how cool video games are. A Patreon bonus, getting into the weeds of video game culture. Here is where we split. You know how this goes. Patreon supporters, I answer more questions that allow me to get into the weeds of things. What is my favorite video game voice hacking performance? Why don't we recognize the big names at the top of the game's closing credits? Why don't more video games depict families? And should anybody aspire to be a video game journalist in the year 2026? I will also remind Patreon supporters right here that if you haven't listened already, you'll find in your podcast feed a new bonus episode on the history of LA Noire with special guest Tim Rogers. It is so good. For everybody else, no worries. We still have so much more show as you already know. For the news of the week, I'm talking with the creators of 1000xResist and Slay the Princess about their incredibly promising new game. So let's split. Act 3, the news of the week, which like let's all be honest with each other, is basically just a mini post-games episode tucked into a normal post-games episode. So with that in mind, today's guest on post-games are Remy Suu, creative director at Sunset Visitor, and Tony Howard Arias, and Abby Howard, co-founders of Black Tabby Games and Black Tabby Publishing. Remy and his team at Sunset Visitor created the Peabody-winning sci-fi game 1000xResist. Their new project, Prove Your Human, blends everything from pull-motion video to capture tests, to explore what it means to be alive in the real world, and inside of our computer screens. Tony and Abby have had an unusual path from video game developer to publisher, thanks in no small part to the tremendous and surprising success of Slay the Princess. That game has allowed them to finish their first and hugely ambitious, episodic narrative horror-ish game, Scarlet Hollow. And both of those games have provided Black Tabby the necessary financial stability to publish games outside of the studio, supporting projects from a written pitch to release and hopefully beyond. We talk about both Prove Your Human and its quite unusual path to existence. To give you a taste of the vibe of the game, I'm going to actually play the audio of the very short teaser trailer and then I'm going to let my guests introduce themselves because three people speak in along with me and I want you to know who's saying what. Let's go. I am human. In this place where everyone takes their bodies for granted, I would never, when I meet my body, I will never part from her. Remy Sue, he, him. Tony Howard, Arius, he, him. Abby Howard, she, her. Let's dig into it. I mean, it's the easiest question up top. Well, I guess it's not easy actually looking at this game. Oh, that's probably the hardest question in the whole. Yeah. I need an elevator pitch for Prove Your Human. Please try your best. Tony should do this. Read that log line, man. Tony, you should do it. Yeah. That part should stay in the podcast. Prove Your Human is a first person narrative adventure game where an AI dares to dream that she's human and it's your job to train her out of her delusions. Over the course of the game, as far as I can tell, you are two versions of you. There is a you that is like in the computer in some way or engaging directly with the machine. And then there is a very human version of you which engaging from the trailer. And I don't know if you can spoil this. We see some full motion video. You see like actual people. Yeah. And I am curious, like, what are we playing as much as you can tell? The player plays as the virtual self, which is a scanned digital consciousness. And the full motion video represents the real what we call the corporeal other, but is your body in meat space. And so in the game, there's a very clear delineation between what is the virtual world and how it's depicted, which is in real time 3D graphics. It's a weird thing to say. But then also your meat body being depicted, as you say, full motion video or filmed a real life action. It's a bit of an exploration of what happens when you are the version of you that is tasked with being basically not human anymore. You have been uploaded. What does that mean? And how does it play into the fact that this computer, MesaFace, is convinced that she is human? And then you have to talk her down from that while also being a digital version of some person who is now basically reaping the reward of making you as a person live in this fake world and be this fake person. When you start your morning commute and go into the office, are you really you anymore? Or is your consciousness slipping into another identity that's prescribed to you? So kind of an exploration of our relationship with labor. What is the self in the context of the modern world where everything is so compartmentalized and using the language of the current moment to explore those themes? Yeah, and seeing somebody benefit from your labor while not being the one who is receiving that benefit as well. Now, I know some people are going to hear this and they're going to think severance like that's the immediate comparison. But it looks different. I have not played the game. You are the experts here. But I have watched your trailer. So I'm basically a full expert, according to the internet. You're in like the top point zero zero zero one percent of the global population in terms of prove your human expertise as we're discussing this right now. Right now. But it also looks very much like a game that is dancing on the third rail of the questions around AI and personhood. And that's what I'm curious about. And I know that we're not going to spoil the game here. But one of the gameplay mechanics that is visible in the game is using CAPTCHA. And CAPTCHA is the kind of quintessential example of how humans are reduced to both behave like AIs and train AI. And then the other end we have an AI who is a human. I say all this to get it kind of a bigger question, which is we used to have so much fiction about artificial intelligence being worthy of personhood, right? Everything was a Pinocchio story and AI stood in for something else. It was a metaphor. But now we live in the age where it's not a metaphor. AI is AI. And there are people who are very threatened by the idea of AI being perceived as having personhood. So I'm curious for y'all, as you are going into making a game about this topic, which again, I could go on Blue Sky right now and just blow up my career, depending on whichever way I talked about it. What are you thinking about? What are you thinking about AI and this idea of AI personhood versus kind of an entire history of this in science fiction? I'm really glad that you brought that up, because usually this is how I like to preface the project, where it's that we have a long tradition in speculative fiction and science fiction to the inception of the genre around artificial intelligence. And as you say, it's usually a stand in for something else. You go all the way back, you can see Frankenstein or Asimov, of course. One of the kind of impetuses of doing this was one, we finished a thousand times, and that game was very porous with the world in 2020. And then throughout to 2024, as we were making it. And then at the end, we kind of looked up and was like, okay, what's going on in the world? What are some of the things that we're anxious about? What are some things that could use an interesting kind of space in which to knock our brains around? And of course, it's very much of what you outlined. And also, an interest to be able to be like, okay, yes, we've had this long tradition of talking about artificial intelligence in science fiction, almost a century worth of it, perhaps even maybe more. All the way back to the Jewish column, I guess. Yeah, yeah. And so as you say, it's a very interesting time to try and do something like that. And to see what we encounter along the way in terms of what it means to tell a science fiction story about artificial intelligence in 2026. Because it definitely didn't play out the way that we thought it would, in many ways, or at least in the process of it. And also the aesthetics of it, and also the affect of it is very different than what we thought it would be. And so that is like the space in which we're trying to jump into. To mine that just a little further, and then I want to get into kind of how this game is coming into existence. But when you say it's not what you expected, there can be a tendency in art to choose a message and then write a story to convey the message. And there is also a different tradition of I am going to come up with the premise and then I am going to learn through the premise. It sounds like you're describing more of the latter. Absolutely. And I also think that's just how we work in general. I think that's like part of the driving force behind the alignment of our studios, where that is the approach that we take to our own game making as well, where we build a scenario and we try and explore it as thoroughly as possible and to create an object of reflection for our audience. Yeah, create a 3D environment, like not an actual game environment, but like basically a 3D object that is the story that people can then explore different facets of. And it means that they're going to perhaps take away something that we could not control, but I don't think you can ever actually control what people take away from media and that trying to do that is a fool's errand. Someone's just going to get mad at you and that's just going to be the end of it versus letting people explore these thoughts in a space that you have made for them to explore it in. Part of the story is this game that's being made by Remy and your team, the people who made one of my favorite games of all time, 1000 times resist. And I'm obviously very excited for this new project, but there's an entire story behind how the project came to be because it is being produced with the other half of y'all with Black Tabby Games. You are developers best known for Sly the Princess in Scarlet Hollow. This is, I believe, your first game as publishers outside of your own work. You all have a very strange story, which is the game that you are maybe best known for, that's changing now once again, is not the game that you were setting out to make as your big project. Scarlet Hollow began first, Sly the Princess comes out midway through it, it is a smaller version of your ideas. That's the project that breaks big. And it ends up being this thing of why do you need to respond to the audience? I need to adapt to what they are telling us. I'm curious, what do you learn from an experience like that? Because I imagine that can be a bit jarring when you're investing your heart and soul into one thing and it's a separate thing that becomes, again, a kind of a dominant cultural force in indie games. Thank you. Yeah. It's hard for us to have that kind of perspective for one. I think it's very important to take a step back before that and talk about the way Sly the Princess came into existence as an ongoing learning process from creating Scarlet Hollow. I think something that's interesting about Scarlet Hollow and that pushes it in the direction that it's going is that I don't think we quite understood the extent of the ambition we started the project with. And it put us in a spot where it was very hard to sell the game. It's an early access episodic horror visual novel whose main marketing hook is, your choices matter, trust us, we're not like other girls, we're really doing it, which is just like, you can only believe that through word of math. So we reached a point where it was clear that finishing Scarlet Hollow is like our singular project was unsustainable. I'd say it takes us about six to nine months to finish the given episode. We were two years into development and it sold 9,000 copies and that's rough and it gets rougher over time. But I think when you're in a position like that, you either keep moving in the same direction and see if you can just force your way forward or you take a step back. You look at like how people are engaging with the work, you look at what's working, what's not, and you adjust, right? So much of Slay the Princess came from the understanding that games as an art form are about communication with an audience that's external to yourself and one that you'll almost never see face to face. And part of communication is getting someone to start listening to you to begin with. So like Slay the Princess's conception started with, okay, like it's really hard to hit people with a hook for Scarlet Hollow immediately, but they love it once they start playing it. How do we make a game that starts from a premise that people connect with immediately and then we go back to working the same magic once they're through the door and get them to love it and then ideally move them on to the next project. We bring this into the publishing as well, starting early from a pitch that is like very simple because we accepted prove your human based on a paper pitch versus a demo or a vertical slice. Just trusting it from the get go and being like this is a strong idea. How do we get this into people's hands? A strong idea that's coming from a strong team with a proven track record and that's true of both of the games that we've signed is a publisher. People who can finish projects that's an entire skill. It's like a second level beyond being able to simply work on a project. But all of this is to say I think the entire creation process is about having a conversation with an audience that you can never see still adapting to what's happening with the things that you're putting out there and adjusting is a bit of a dance and that ultimately I don't think that lecturing or starting from a conclusion is an effective way of having a dialogue. Yeah. I want to come back to the publishing in just a second before that. Remy, for you with 1000 times resist, from what I can tell on the outside it's always hard because you can't see numbers, but 1000 times resist success was gradual. Like it was a building success. What did you learn from that first year or plus of its life, both about how games grow or don't grow and also how your own sanity reacts to that process? There was a lot of surprise for us. Usually you work on something in the performing arts. You put it out there, you perform it. You don't really see the audience because you can't really see them. Then that's it. That's usually the arc of it. But to have that unfold over a year with 1000 times, it was like, oh my god, this is strange and unusual for us. And also learning that it's strange and unusual for games. And it was, I think we were just improvising as we were going when it came to how that was developing. We knew going into releasing 1000 times that it was already a very difficult game to describe. And we were only hoping that when people played it, much like Tony was talking about Scarlet Hollow, that they would discover what it was really about and why we were interested in making it. So I think seeing that happen real time was also very pretty amazing. What I learned, I still think I'm in the process of unpacking what I learned, but in development of the second game already, it's like, you don't feel like sometimes you can enumerate what you've learned. But then in, say, the office when we're developing, it's like, oh, we have this, you know, all of a sudden we shouldn't do this or we should do this because XYZ of experience. So that's an interesting experience to have. Oh, we do remember things. And we're trying to learn from them. I want to talk to you all about the publishing side now of like you two working together as groups, because it's unusual. It's maybe a little less unusual than it used to be. But there are so many publishers in the indie space. And here you are as a video game studio turned publisher. What are you offering with Black Tabby? What do you feel like you specialize in that the others don't? I think that there's an intense value that comes from being in the trenches of development and especially the self publishing world where we came from. I think that it means that when we are talking to Remy and the rest of the team at Sunset Visitor about what they're working on, we're able to simultaneously have discussions about it as artists as well as marketers and publishers. Because we are a small team, which means that we had our hands on every aspect of the games that we have made. And Remy is the same way and everyone at Sunset Visitor is the same way of just this really small collaborative group of people who kind of has to understand what the start and finish of making a game is going to be, including the writing, the game design, how everything ties together. So just having this complete vision of a project. I also think it's worth saying that it's good to have a lot of people who are funding games. We're funding games at different levels. You are funding games in different niches, right? We're like focused on a niche that we understand really well. And one of the things that I think, I hope, sets us apart and contributes to the success of games that we signed is I've described this as us acting in a similar role to editors in the book publishing industry. Remy, from his performing arts background, described it as dramaturgy, which sounds way cooler. So maybe I'll lean towards that. But the concept is that we're people who are invested in the project and are intimately aware of it throughout its course of development, but we're not actually making it ourselves. So we can still engage with it as with a critical artistic perspective, but from a different angle. And then that can inform the decisions that the team ultimately decides to make on their own. And this is all very much still in the experimental phases. So maybe in however long it takes for Proof Your Hoop and to finish, we will be eating these words, but who knows. But it's worth trying something, right? Because the other thing is it's so easy as a developer who only exists in that role to pontificate about all of the ways publishing could be better or oh, if the industry was like this or that, all of the problems would be fixed. And I'm not dared to suggest that our work truly fixes what are systemic issues. But one of the things that I've caught myself saying a lot is I feel like there are all of these very experienced teams who have strong track records, even coming from single titles, right? Like 1000 times resist. By the end of its first year, was like quite profitable. And one of Peabody, like people adore that game. And when you're a developer like that, maybe publishers should just join up with you at the ideation phase when all there is is a paper pitch and say, all right, we're here, we're supporting you. Now, turn this into something. And that avoids like a lot of the time that's lost to ongoing conversations that eventually do or don't result in a deal. But like that time is money. And you know, that's what keeps the lights on. And it also puts us in a position where it's like there, there has been so much flexibility for what the shape of the game looks like. Because we didn't wait until there was a vertical slice. We didn't wait until there was a demo. We didn't wait until there was an intense time crusher. We just said, yes, at the beginning, and now we get to explore together what that shape is going to look like. Yeah, I'm going to have to do an episode at another point about editors and video games. This is maybe the year of that coming up over and over again. I heard it from the developer of esoteric ab. I think editors were all over the place at the IGF awards in terms of narrative. It definitely feels like it's having a moment before we wrap up. Remy, how things changed or not changed working directly with a team that they themselves are game developers? I think in that way, a lot has changed in very much the ways that Abby and Tony kind of outlined. It's like, we do get to have these dramaturgical discussions on a pretty regular basis. Something that Tony has said before, a lot of storytelling does have to understand how it will be perceived from a marketing perspective, at least when it comes to indie games and the desire to hope that people play them. It's been really interesting to have that kind of outside perspective this early on and moving through the game. Because I think it has helped. I'm going to point at Natalie here. Natalie's in the writer's room. Natalie can attest to, we bring these up in the writer's room. We bring these concerns up, but we bring up things or ideas that have come up and we start to ideate around them as well. It's always, I guess again, coming from that device background, we always like to have everything in the room as early as possible so that we get to play with them as it gets made. In the theater context, it used to be that light, at least for ourselves, and sound would come afterwards. Much of my time in the theater was like, okay, let's bring that into the room as early as possible. Have that become part of the ideation process. I think it's interesting that what's happening now is that the publishing process and the marketing process and all of that is coming in so early that it gets to be played with in that way, in a kind of creative way as well. Thanks all of you for doing this. It was really great to chat. Where should people go to follow the games for now? Sunset Visitor has a Discord server. Proof Your Human is going to live on the Sunset Visitor server. You can follow us on Blue Sky. Remy's going to be upset if I don't say, wishless, prove your human on Steam. Also, I should be upset of myself if I don't say that. I don't know. I think social media is all over the place. I think we'll have a subreddit. Newsletter. Tumblr. Sure we have. Blue Sky Tumblr. Anybody go there? You can pick your poison and we'll be there waiting for your arrival. We emptied some of the mailbag. Not all of it. There were so many great questions and I am very sorry I couldn't get to all of them. If I missed yours, I hope to hear from you again, hopefully in the next mailbag episode. Next week, I am talking about a game that I am so excited for and that is all I can say right now. I wish I could tell you more but apparently we are in the thick of embargo season and I can't really tell you anything about new episodes until they go live. Until then, a reminder, post game supporters get the show and the newsletter early on Fridays at 5pm Eastern, usually much earlier than that. They get extra acts and bonus materials. This week, Patreon listeners got a humongous extra mailbag section. There is also the recent episode of past games in which special guest Tim Rogers joined me to share and explore the history of LA Noire which is celebrating his 15th anniversary. Plus, on top of all of that stuff, no ads on anything. Subscribe to the Patreon for just five bucks at patreon.com forward slash post games. Subscribe to the newsletter for free and get full show notes at post.games, post games logo by James Barum, theme by Mark Sparling. All interviews and post games are edited for Concision and Clarity and a special thank you to this week's guests and thank you to everyone who sent in questions. Like the show, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify or share the show with a friend. That's it. Now to take us out an original song from Riz Dungeon Skeleton Key to My Heart coming to Steam in 2026. This is Blushing by James Courier. See you next week.