Mewgenics Is Out, And It Only Took 14 Years (with Edmund McMillen)

Jason, Kirk, and Maddy bring on veteran game designer Edmund McMillen (Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy) to talk about his latest game, Mewgenics, which was first announced in 2012 (!) and is out this week. They talk about the long development cycle, why McMillen parted ways with his Team Meat partner Tommy Refenes, breeding cats, and much much more.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Kirk Hamilton?

  You ever think about how dogs and cats are both predators? It's weird to think of my dog as a predator, since the main things she hunts are treats and scratches. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking with Edmund McMillan about the wacky, battle-tested cats of his new game Eugenics, a long-end development feline tactical road bike that finally comes out this week. Let's get into it.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:33Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Hello.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  It's us again.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  It's good to be back.

• 0:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it is good to be back.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Every time.

• 0:40Kirk Hamilton?

  It's always good to be back. It's good to be back on Triple Click, making our favorite gaming podcast, my favorite gaming podcast to listen to, actually. I listen every week, and I like to listen to Triple Click.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  It's pretty good.

• 0:51Jason Schreier?

  It is fun to listen to.

• 0:52Kirk Hamilton?

  It is. It's fun to listen to, even when you have to listen to your own voice.

• 0:55Jason Schreier?

  It's good to enjoy the things that you make, as this episode we'll dive into.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  So true.

• 1:01Kirk Hamilton?

  That is true.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  That is gonna come up.

• 1:03Kirk Hamilton?

  That is gonna be a running theme of this episode, and we feel really grateful to get to make this podcast that we enjoy making. And the reason for that is that you all support our show. If you would like to support Triple Click, you can become a Maximum Fun member. That's the way to do it. We do not have advertisers on the show. We don't get paid for ads. We don't have sponsors or do any of that stuff. We just have listeners who directly support us, and that's it. And it's very cool. I think each of our listeners is kind of like a member of a club. If you support Triple Click, if you support this kind of thing, you are helping make the world a better place. I think that's actually true.

• 1:42Jason Schreier?

  In many ways, each of our listeners is meundies.

• 1:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. So if you'd like to join the club of Maximum Fun members, the club of Triple Click supporters, it's very easy to do so. Go to maximumfun.org/join, sign up to become a member, and of course, if you become a member, you get access to a ton of bonus episodes that we have recorded, one every month since we started making this show in 2020, almost six years ago, totally wild.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:10Kirk Hamilton?

  So that is a hell of a lot of bonus, bonus episodes that you can listen to. We talk about movies, TV shows, games. We do spoiler casts. That's typically where we put those. Also, just all kinds of other random stuff. It's a really fun grab bag of triple click material. Maximumfun.org/join. Become a member. Support our show. All right, this is a very exciting episode. We have a very exciting guest. Jason, how about you? You tell our listeners who we're gonna have on the show.

• 2:36Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, today we're gonna be talking to Edmund McMillan, who is a longtime indie game designer. He was profiled in Indie Game, the Movie, which is a movie we talked about as a bonus episode just a few months ago.

• 2:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, speaking of bonus episodes.

• 2:50Jason Schreier?

  Edmund McMillan was, became kind of prominent with Super Meat Boy, his 2010 platformer. But really, his claim to fame is The Binding of Isaac, which came out in 2011 and became a humongous success story. Wound up selling more than 5 million copies. In the years that followed, he kept updating it, doing DLCs and patches, and the game got humongous over time. Super cool, kind of rogue-like, I wouldn't say pioneer, but certainly helped popularize rogue-like and set the stage for a lot of rogue-likes that have come in the 2010s and 2020s. And Edmund has a new game that is just out called Mewgenics.

• 3:34Jason Schreier?

  I am obsessed with this game. I have played a lot, many, many hours, 50, 56, 57 hours of Mewgenics. And just to kind of give you guys a description, give everybody a description. You two have played a little bit also, but give listeners a description. It is essentially part rogue-like and part simulation game. So for part of the game, you are in this house and you can, and it is a house that cats live in. And in this house, every time you go to sleep, there is a chance-

• 4:05Kirk Hamilton?

  The house the cats built.

• 4:06Jason Schreier?

  The house the cats built. There's a chance-

• 4:08Kirk Hamilton?

  That sounded like you were gonna say, "This is the house the cats built."

• 4:11Speaker 01

  The cats don't build the house though.

• 4:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Which is not entirely untrue.

• 4:14Jason Schreier?

  The cats scratch and destroy things. No. Every time you go to sleep, there's a chance that two of the- Cats will copulate and make a kitten and that kitten will take on some of the stats and potentially skills from its parents. And there are all sorts of kind of crazy, crazy things that can happen with the system that I won't get into, but that's kind of part of the game. And then what you do is you take some of these cats, you can pick up to four cats and take them out on an adventure and you take them through various rogue-like stages. The first act takes you through the alley and then from there you can go into areas like the sewers or the cemetery, the boneyard it's called, and so on and so forth. And you go on to like more than a dozen of these different areas on rogue-like adventures.

• 4:59Jason Schreier?

  And as you go through the rogue-like, you fight battles with these cats, which are grid-based, turn-based, strategy battles. And so each cat has a turn and you move them around and you try to take out the enemies before they take you out. And what's really special about this game is the way that you, each of these cats gets abilities that can be combined and synergized and used to break the game in all sorts of fun and clever and creative ways. You can assign different classes to your cats. There are more than a dozen of these and they get pretty elaborate and fun. You can use them to do all sorts of cool things from, I don't know, shooting fire to freezing enemies, using electricity on water to take out all the enemies

• 5:44Jason Schreier?

  in the water, to summoning rocks and then eating the rocks and then summoning more rocks that will turn into allies and sending them out after opponents. But uh oh, this person eats rocks. What is he gonna do with that? And so on and so forth. The possibilities are endless. And it's really fun to breed the cats and figure out, like, get them really powerful with all sorts of inherited abilities, then take them out on adventures and then you bring them home and you breed them some more. So it's a very satisfying loop that I think people are going to really enjoy. So we're gonna bring Emin on and we're gonna ask him about the development of this game, which was quite a saga and much more. So without further ado, let's bring in Edmund.

• 6:30Jason Schreier?

  Hello Edmund, thank you so much for coming and welcome to TripleClick.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 6:35Jason Schreier?

  Hello.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 6:37Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, man, I am very excited to talk about Mugenix because it has taken over my life over the last few weeks.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  It's all he talks about.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, imagine if it was six years.

• 6:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, well.

• 6:49Kirk Hamilton?

  You could probably relate to this experience.

• 6:52Jason Schreier?

  How much of that six years was you just playing the game instead of working on it?

• 6:55Speaker 03

  It's still work when I'm playing it.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 7:00Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, it's work when Jason's playing it too, right?

• 7:02Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, technically it is. I've done a run every day for the past two years.

• 7:09Jason Schreier?

  Okay, okay. I want to start from the beginning and I want to get to the development of this game because we're actually not going to talk too much about the gameplay because the three of us are gonna get into it more next week without you when Kirk and Manny have had more of a chance to play it.

• 7:24Kirk Hamilton?

  And when we can really say what we think.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 7:27Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, without you watching. But I want to talk about the development of this game because this game was announced in 2012, 14 years ago.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Yes, it was.

• 7:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Was there a question?

• 7:42Jason Schreier?

  And since then, it was cancelled, it parted ways. Can you tell me a little bit about this? So let's go back in time. It is 2011, you've just released Binding of Isaac. You thought Mugenix was going to be your next project at that point. What was your kind of your state of mind then?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Definitely. I mean, I was fully in belief that it was going to be the next thing, the big project that I was going to be working on, and it kind of was for a little while.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I knew I wanted to make a rogue-like, a big rogue-like with Tommy, and Binding of Isaac was a practice. It was like, I'm gonna dip my toes in the water here, I'm gonna learn some stuff, I've never done this before, we're gonna figure out what works and what doesn't, so I can apply it to this other game. And the game that we started originally was called A Thousand Cats, I think it was called, and eventually became Mugenix, especially when all the breeding stuff was added to the game and became the focus of it. And I absolutely loved it. And it wasn't the game it was now, so it's not comparable. It's the...

• 8:45Speaker 03

  The core of the game has not changed. The core of the game is you breed cats in a house, in a hoarder cat house, and you use these cats, and they have genetics, and they pass on their genetics and how they look and everything else, and you use these cats as avatars in another game, or other mini games. That was always the design of the game. And it took place in this world that was Binding of Isaac adjacent, where there's all these characters in this town that were off putting and strange and kind of just generally bad. And I loved everything about it. The vibe was really cool. A lot of the music, I think like 14 or 15 tracks were made then, that were better, that you hear, you hear

• 9:25Speaker 03

  it on the radio now. Most of those became radio tracks. And, man, you know, I was just ten over heels in love with the project, but I was the only one that was. And it's kind of hard to finish a game when you're the only person who was enjoying it. And I think, I mean, Tommy got really cold feet because, I mean, as you would assume, this game is a weird game, much like Binding of Isaac, it could be controversial and strange and off putting and weird, and it's not a guaranteed success. And I think that's kind of what Tommy was looking for. And he felt like a guaranteed success would be another Meat Boy game. And he pitched the idea of an auto running phone game, and I thought

• 10:10Speaker 03

  that that would be fine. And, yeah, and then it got to, I think, he just couldn't work on me genetics anymore. He, I think he showed it at PAX, and he just says he wasn't feeling it and said, asked if we could just kind of put it on pause and then focus on Meat Boy, so we can, he can feel good about, you know, something that's more fanfare, I guess.

• 10:33Kirk Hamilton?

  So essentially, you canceled it. You guys hourly canceled it in 2016.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  I didn't cancel it. I, I thought we were just pausing it. But then I heard in an email from my Valve contact, because Tommy lives up there. And I guess he had lunch with him or whatever. And he was like, oh, yeah, sorry about, sorry to hear about the me genetics cancellation, but I'm looking forward to the Meat Boy stuff. And I'm like, did you?

• 10:58Kirk Hamilton?

  You didn't know it was canceled. Oh, man. But can you really cancel an idea?

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can. Not in my brain, at least. It was haunting. And for years, I was trying to re-

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Re wrap this thing to make Tommy like it and like kind of pitching it like, oh, maybe it's like a spelunky, like it's got platforming elements. I don't know. It wasn't, it wasn't happening. And when, when I left the company, I took the IP with me. And at that point, I had bit off way more than I could chew. I had started a bunch of stupid projects that took forever to, to come out.

• 11:42Jason Schreier?

  So for people who aren't familiar, this is you're referring to Tommy, your Fennas, who was the co creator of Super Meat Boy, also prominently featured in indie game, The Movie. And so you left the company. Why did you leave the company? Was it because of this? Were there other reasons as well?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  There's a, an infinite number of reasons. It was, it wasn't working. I mean, and I think it was very apparent that it wasn't working. I think we just had a lot of different

• 12:08Speaker 03

  opinions on what we were doing and motivations. I think we just clearly had different motivations. I think we, we started out and when we met, we jived very, very well. And he was my best friend for forever. And I think, I don't know, just time, time changes people, success changes people, you know, everybody has different things that they want. People start having families and getting married and, you know, things carry you in different directions. And

• 12:36Speaker 03

  it happened. I mean, it's, it's happened in the past. I've, I've had situations where I was sure I was going to be working with these people for forever. And then it just hit a wall. And I was the only one that wanted to continue to move forward. And I, I, I'm like a shark. I need to keep swimming forward or I die. And that it's, it's not an uncommon thing where I will get to a point where I'm like, yeah, isn't this fun? Let's go, go, go. And then everybody else is dying. And I just got to keep going. And I have a sense of guilt about that, too. But the thing is, is, you know,

• 13:12Speaker 03

  When I'm not happy, when I'm not being creative, I'm not happy. And when I'm not happy, I'm a terrible husband and a terrible father and a terrible person. And I'm trying to avoid that.

• 13:20Jason Schreier?

  That is a good mission statement. So let's back up a little bit before we get more into Eugenics, because something else that happened that I think surprised many people was that Binding of Isaac became a smash hit. It's funny, you watch Indiana Game, the movie, and it's like Super Meat Boy was a was a huge success, selling a hundred thousand copies. And then Binding of Isaac, which you you guys think is going to be this like weird experimental thing that is just kind of, as you mentioned, a prototype for what you would do in the future, that goes on to sell millions of copies. What was that like for you? How did that impact your life?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Not much personally, but in my relationships, it obviously caused some issues.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it could have been a point of contention, definitely between me and Tommy. I heard a lot about that. I tried to get him into it. Like, I tried to get him on board, but he just didn't want to. I think you, again, it was like a, I don't know if I want to be associated with that sort of stuff. And I'm not going to force people. And so, yeah, but otherwise, it was just normal. Like, my life, what, like, I have money for pinball machines now? I don't know. Like, I'm not a big spender. I'm not like a flashy person. And I'm, you know, I'm comfortable enough to be able to hire a small team now, which is really neat. But nothing really changed in my life. It was kind of just like, well, okay, let's move on to the next thing. And I was trying a bunch of different things.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  But the I kept getting pulled back to Binding of Isaac, mostly because my wife was playing it. She played it so much. And she was kind of like, well, I've finished it.

• 14:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Am I right that the that the development on Isaac was really short?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's three months.

• 15:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Three months, which is a pretty huge difference, right?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  It was a small game. It was like a simple little thing.

• 15:06Jason Schreier?

  And then you kept testing it because your wife was playing.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, most definitely. Like, she thousands of hours, an obscene amount. Before we had kids, that's all she would do is play Isaac.

• 15:16Kirk Hamilton?

  So how was that just creatively, where you put the game out and then, like, it's not a service game exactly, right? People aren't paying a subscription. But it was a game that I watched change so significantly over a really long period of time to where it's it's not unrecognizable, but it's very different now compared to what it was, you know, after those three months. What was that creative process like, this live game that you're changing?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  It was neat.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  It was neat because I got, I felt like I got to have this kind of interactive storytelling in a very abstract way with the audience, where I got to see people's interpretations of the game and be able to understand what they assumed, so I could subvert expectations. You know, I knew what they wanted, I could give them a little bit, but then I could also give them what I wanted. I don't know, it was this cool marriage of ideas that slowly became more about the audience than it was about me, which was somewhat hard in the beginning, but eventually when I was able to let go of it, I mean, it's, it's just kind of like passing of the guard. Like, the last thing that I did was hand this off, basically, like, to the biggest fan in the world, who made a DLC, the final DLC with me.

• 16:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Who is that for listeners who don't know who that is?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  That was, that's Vin. He's an amazing creative person. He started a, it was almost a rival mod called Antibirth. And I saw it and I instantly knew. It's one of those things where like, I see people modding the game all the time, but there's, there are certain rules that are very hard to define in my world. And he was abiding by the rules in ways that I would. And they're impossible for me to explain the rules. And I was just so impressed. I was so impressed by, by everything. And just the, the work ethic of, of him working on this project for like six or seven years.

• 17:08Kirk Hamilton?

  That's interesting that you describe this kind of, not give and take, but like an interactive relationship with the audience, as this game kind of exists and they're finding things and you're putting out updates, where with Mewgenics, you're kind of, you were in a, you know, six-year pod. I mean, I know you have testers and stuff, but it's a really different experience. Are you trying to like, create that process? Or did you want to do something different after doing something like that on Isaac?

• 17:33Speaker 03

  No, I mean, because I mean, initially Isaac was similar, where it's like, I've got this thing, it's very much how I want it, and we're going to put it out there. And I, in all honesty, I could see myself working on Mewgenics for five or six more years. Easy. Easy. It's very fun.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you hoping to have the audience participate in Mewgenics as well? Because it, it does feel that way already from playing.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  I want to know. I like, I machine gunned so many things that are everywhere. They're in the subtlety, the things that people say, they're in the background, they're in the randomized.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Graffiti on the wall. And I'm, I'm looking to see what hits and what misses and where I can move with this. It's, it's very, it feels very much like being a dungeon master in, in D and D or whatever, where I'm really listening to the audience. So I know what they expect, what they want, what they think and make, and doing some sort of marriage of ideas. Where it's like, okay, I accept that you like this character and everybody likes this character. So I should probably lean in this, to this story a little bit. So I can give a little fanfare here and there. And I did that with Isaac. It was, there was a lot of,

• 18:43Speaker 03

  like everyone assuming that mom is this horrible person. And I felt like I did mom such a disservice in the beginning. But I didn't think the game was going to be anything. You know, it was like this nothing thing. So in, in DLCs, I wanted to paint this pictures of, of like who, what made mom this way. Like, well, she's not, she's not the villain. You know, the, the world is the villain. They're all, they're all victims here. And I wanted to be able to paint that picture. And I wouldn't have done that without people saying, and saying things like, oh, mom's terrible. And, you know, she's the bad guy and she's evil and she's this and she's that. And it's like, well,

• 19:22Speaker 03

  are you seeing that I'm, when you're seeing cutscenes that are drawn from Isaac's drawings, not, you're not necessarily supposed to assume that that's real. You know what I mean? Like, and that's not coming through. So I need to really push that a little bit more where I show reality and perspective from a child. And yeah, I think, I think I, the book has been based, is closed on Isaac. And I think I'm very happy with the whole picture now. Nice.

• 19:54Jason Schreier?

  I can think of a couple of characters in Mewgenics who will become fan favorites. Tink specifically, but we'll get into that.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Tink is maybe my favorite.

• 20:01Jason Schreier?

  Tink is good.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Hard to say.

• 20:02Jason Schreier?

  I, so, okay. So going back to this timeline in Mewgenics. So you quit Team Meet, you leave the company, you say, you, you go on to do your own stuff. You wind up releasing The Legend of Bumbos, still working on Isaac. At one point, at what point did you really kick back into gear on Mewgenics, pick it back up and say, okay, we're going to go into active development on this thing?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  We started it like right when COVID hit. And by we, I mean Tyler. Because I was still working on other things. But Tyler had to make the whole engine. So everything in that in the game is like all running off of his engine and exporters and all the stuff that he's made himself. And so he had to get all that rigged up. And it was the same engine that he that we used for the end is now, which was. It's a good game that I didn't have the. I didn't want to cry in interviews, so I didn't do interviews.

• 20:57Jason Schreier?

  Oh, man.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just didn't feel good about talking about that game. But it was a significant game and I'm very proud of it. And the remnants of the engine of that became the megenics engine, but we didn't even know what genre it was. So we tried a few. I mean, we tried like a castle crasher style brawler with cats, you know? We tried a pickman like where you would choose an alpha and have a bunch of little kittens that would follow and you'd use those.

• 21:23Jason Schreier?

  Was there a genre when you were first working on it?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, the genre, it was mini game. So the the main one was the Pokemon turn based strategy. So it was really bare bones turn based strategy.

• 21:34Jason Schreier?

  So you would breed cats and then take them out into the world and do this kind of turn based stroke like.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  But there were other mini games too. There was like a cat race. Where you would just you're racing your cat. And then there was tink had a beauty pageant that you'd participate in. You know, your cat would just be ranked on charisma and that sort of stuff. It was pretty. It was all really, really basic stuff. But, uh, yeah, and we kept kind of like coming back to this turn based strategy thing and then moving away from it because it's like the hardest thing to do. Um, and then the end, we're just like, oh, whatever. It's a challenge. What else are we going to do with our lives?

• 22:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, it fits perfectly because this is very much a game about finding like playing around with systems, finding combos, finding ways to break everything.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:22Jason Schreier?

  And strategy, grid based strategy returns feels like the kind of the perfect way to explore that because you can sit back and think between each action in a way that I think breaking systems, I mean, it can be fun in other games too, but it's it's not quite as, uh, I think satisfying when you don't have that kind of extra 30 seconds to be like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. This is not going to break the game this time.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Or even hours like I'll sometimes go to sleep and be like, well, I have that. I have that item that I just got at the end of Iran. Is that gonna work if I do like, how can I break that? Like, how can I make that work? Um, which is, which is neat. I, I, yeah, I love the game.

• 23:05Jason Schreier?

  Man, that's so, you can always tell when, when a game is great. Uh, oftentimes you can, you can tell this sort of thing, especially a systems based game like this. So, yeah, so you guys are prototyping. You come up with this turn based strategy. You land on that finally. What is the next five years look like? Cause I know you guys had thought you would be out much sooner than it actually was.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, I think for Tyler, it was just a bunch of busy work, a tremendous amount of busy work. Um, getting all the systems in place and making sure that they were all there as early as possible. So we can make it work and make sure that everything talked to everything else. Um, there were a lot of systems that were just hypothetical, like this works in my brain. It should work in the game, um, kind of trusting it and then tweaking and tuning as we go. On my end, it was me accepting defeat and realizing that I have two children and a wife, and I cannot kill myself working all day long. I have to be somewhat of a father and a husband. Um, and, uh, so I'm hiring, I started hiring people and I started hiring fans.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  I like people that did fan art that drew like similar to me. And most of them were inspired, like grew up drawing like me. Um, so they really knew it. They really knew my style, the things, you know, the no nos and the yes, yeses. And, um, yeah, I started working with a bunch of different people that were handling backgrounds and the animations. There's so many animations in this game, like thousands and thousands and thousands of animations in this game. And over the course of six years, I think we went through like six, six or seven animators. But we've had three for quite a while that have always been there and one lead Marty. Marty is like. Done the lion's share of the craziest animations, all the boss animations and cutscene, a lot of the cutscenes, the craziest stuff.

• 24:55Jason Schreier?

  It's very fun to hear you talk about hiring fans who are inspired by this game because I don't know if you remember this, but in Endgame the Movie, which I guess this was 2010 this was filmed, maybe 2009, you talk about your own inspirations and how much you want to inspire people with your art and with your work one day. You show some drawings and you show, you talk about like playing Nintendo games and being inspired and now-

• 25:20Kirk Hamilton?

  So really this was a hiring strategy.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  It was on my business plan.

• 25:24Jason Schreier?

  Years later, yeah. I mean, this is, you pulled, you pulled it off.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess it was just natural. I've never, I don't even know what some of these people look like. I don't know their birth gender. I don't know. I know nothing. Like, I have an idea of who they are and I'm, and I'm, I'm careful with, with what I call them, but I don't know what's going on here and I don't know if they've ever been to college and I don't care. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, they're all really cool people who are really good at what they do and I don't know anything else about them other than that and they're great to work with. And, uh, and I mean, I just, I assume that since they're fans, we're on the same page for the most part.

• 26:06Kirk Hamilton?

  When you say they know the yes, yeses and the no, no's, are you making a joke that they know that none of the characters have noses? Or are you just saying that they know the no, no's? I'm curious what the no, no's are, whether or not you were making a pun there. Like, what are the actual kind of, you know, just some of the things that they understand coming in?

• 26:25Speaker 03

  It's hard to fucking say. It's so hard to say. Like, it's, there are just, I'll say this, like, a lot of, like when modding started with Binding of Isaac, the first thing people did was they put like Jesus in the game or guns in the game or stuff like that. And those would be no, no's. And can I explain why those are no, no's? I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't feel right. And, um- I don't know, they just, they really get it. It's, I, it's so cool to be able to be, to just give somebody this kind of loose suggestion of what I like, what I need, and then just say, you do you. I know what you do, and I like it. That's why you're here. And you do your thing. You make it special to you, because I want you to have fun, because it's gonna come through.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna be this anal controlling person, every little detail or whatever else. It's just like, make it look like this, however you want to make it look like this, and you give it back to me, and then I'll notice something about it that I think is really cool, and then I'll pull that into the game. Like, it'll just, it's just a really fun collective of, and they don't even know that.

• 27:28Kirk Hamilton?

  I would imagine it's an advantage to having such a, you know, established body of work that so many of the people coming to you are very familiar with, where, you know, if you were just putting together a team, and no one knew who you were or what you liked, you'd have to be explaining this to them. You'd have to articulate it. But this way, you don't actually have to. You can just say, well, you played 300 hours of Binding of Isaac. You either get it or you don't, and then they can kind of just demonstrate that to you.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's very true, and I've heard it many times. I'm not, I'm not good at explaining. I'm just bad at it. I don't know.

• 28:01Kirk Hamilton?

  In a way, you're good at explaining it, because you made all these games, and then that explains it better than maybe words could.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are the texts.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. It's like, I don't have to do it, because they know. I, I, yeah. I'm, I'm not like a great teacher when it comes to that sort of stuff, and like,

• 28:17Speaker 03

  even, like even Tyler, I think, will say, like, Tyler trusts me, and doesn't need to understand some of the stuff. But he knows that the way I work is very hard to put into words and explain, because I'm working very abstractly when it comes to the themes and story and characters and XYZ. All he cares about is the, the structure, and that's very specific, and I can be very specific about that, and everything else, I can just float around and grab what works and, and make it happen, and, and everybody can just trust that I.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  We'll come through the other, the other side and it'll all make sense.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Based on how you're describing this, it sounds like all of you are remote and long distance workers, which in watching Endgame, the movie, you and Tommy were that way, like way before COVID, way before everybody was having those conversations about how to work in that way. And I'm curious how you feel about that, especially given you're saying, oh, I have trouble explaining things to people. Do you feel like it would be easier if they were in person or that doesn't really matter to you? Maybe never did.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  It'd just be awkward, right? Yeah, it's kind of weird to think.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  I,

• 29:33Speaker 03

  I think I've only met Matthias and Tyler out of all the people in person. Am I wrong in thinking that? I'm pretty sure that's it. Everybody involved are, you know, they're internet kids. Like this is just as real on the internet as is in real life. And I think a lot of people are just completely fine with that. I like, I think one of the more prominent people, Takara,

• 29:59Speaker 03

  involved in the project throughout, she's a, she's very online. She does a lot of VR, social VR stuff. She'll watch movies with her friends in VR.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  So I think, you know, I lucked out. It's just a bunch of people who don't require that sort of thing. I'll do calls sometimes with people, rarely sync up and talk in person, but everything else is just remote text. And it's worked very well, remarkably well. It's weird to think, because I mean, you're making me think about it now. And it's like, I don't even know what Joey sounds like. I've worked with him for six years. I have no idea. Like, he's done all the sounds in the game himself.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Well, then you do know what he sounds like.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. I know what his cat, I know his cat meow. I know his cat voice.

• 30:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Maybe that's just how he talks.

• 30:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Maybe he's a cat.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  I guess, I mean, I guess to me, this stuff doesn't really matter.

• 30:49Jason Schreier?

  Can you, can you help us understand the workflow here? So you, so it sounds like Tyler is doing a lot of the programming work, a lot of the systems work. Are you, are you kind of going back and forth? This is of course Tyler Gleyel, your partner on this. Are you going back and forth with him on, you're telling him, this is what we have in mind. This is what act one is going to look like. Let's make this like, what is the exact, you're drawing stuff, he's programming. Like, what is the exact workflow? And then how does that kind of disperse to other employees? What exactly does it look like?

• 31:17Speaker 03

  It is so weird. It is, there's nothing, nothing. It looks like nothing. Like, it looks like we both are doing our own thing and somehow we know what we're doing and we're both doing our thing. And we, we're just doing our stuff over here and then we'll go whoop and then go do our stuff over here. It, the, the best structure that we have is, is a Google Doc, which is mostly a spread, multiple spreadsheets of items and abilities. Everything else is just kind of like going by feel and knowing what needs to be. We played a lot of games, man. I don't know. Like, it just, we know what needs to get done. Tyler is incredibly structured, incredibly structured.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  And he keeps me from floating away. And he keeps things in line and he's, he knows the dates we need to hit and everything else like that. And he'll remind me of X, Y, Z. And we've been able to just hit all those things. And with everybody else, it's just like, nobody's working, I mean, right now, maybe they're working full time, but nobody was ever really working full time. It was just like, can you get, think you can get this done in like two weeks? And if you can get it done sooner, I'll toss more stuff at you. And it's, it's my, my side of things is waking up in the morning, delegating, checking in, making sure I'm getting files here, here and here. Going through my, my list of, of nonsense that I need to do, taking notes,

• 32:39Speaker 03

  making sure all that shit's done and then doing like, like this sort of stuff, like PR stuff, making sure all that's done, talking with steam, you know, all the, the, the business nonsense that goes into this as well. And then.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  It's just chaos. It's it's just chaos and it's working.

• 32:58Jason Schreier?

  So how did you know how big to make the game? I think something that I found.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  We did it. We had a whoopsie. We did a whoopsie.

• 33:05Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I want to know more about that because I think I found I'm something like 57 hours in.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know where.

• 33:12Jason Schreier?

  It's going to sound intimidating to a lot of a lot of listeners out there and I feel like I'm still discovering all sorts of new stuff that is kind of breaking my brain a little bit with how much there is.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Did you just start act three?

• 33:23Jason Schreier?

  I just unlocked the third area in act three.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yes, that's about right.

• 33:29Jason Schreier?

  And so I guess, how do you know when you're adding so much stuff to this game? Tell me a little bit about the whoopsie and how do you actually know when it's when it's done, when it's ready to go out the door?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, the whoopsie was and we had it. I mean, I I guess I'm ambitious when it comes to these things and I was like, well, I want to. It got to the point where I felt like this game was better than The Binding of Isaac and I wanted to be able to do it enough of a service for at least someone, one person other than me to agree. And I had a plan on paper and I wanted these acts to happen. They all seemed doable. It all seemed very feasible. And we just kind of went for it. And then I think when we had finished the game, you know, had a full playthrough, which is probably about three or four months ago.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  We're like, shit, we could have just done two. Like, we could have just done two acts and have have the third one be DLC. So really, the game is kind of like a full game and then a DLC.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  But that's fine. I mean, people.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  It sucks with me. I'm like painting myself into a corner with Isaac because they see Isaac as this thing. And they don't see it as this thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, that stacks up into this bigger thing. And they expect Isaac this in in terms of features. And I didn't think that that was remotely possible in mid-development. But then by mid-development, when we had 1,200 different abilities in the game and I'm working on items and I'm like, I want at least 300 items in this game. And then it got to 500 items in this game and I'm like, well, Isaac has 750 items, so I can. Might as well do it. And at that point, I'm like, I'll program it. I don't know what I'm doing. Because Tyler's like, if you really want to have over 750 items,

• 35:15Speaker 03

  you're gonna need to learn a program. You're gonna need to do this because I'm not doing this. I have other things I need to do. I'm like, I'll do it. I'll do it. So I'm just like copying, pasting shit from the existing stuff and hodgepodge it together and making it work. And then I hired Vin to come help me with the harder stuff.

• 35:30Jason Schreier?

  Seems like a bug tester's nightmare.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tyler doesn't like it.

• 35:38Jason Schreier?

  He's just a rogue programmer. Oh, my God. I'm imagining this happening on like a AAA project.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  But he trusted me. He trusted me and it worked out. I mean, he.

• 35:46Jason Schreier?

  The director's gotten into the engine, guys.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  It was, I'm sure it was very hard and scary for him. And I've heard him many times be like, oh, I bet I know who did this item. I'm like, well, I don't know what I'm doing.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  I'm just copying and pasting.

• 36:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Am I remembering correctly that you finished a complete playthrough in 270 hours? Is that, is that the number?

• 36:11Speaker 03

  240. 240. My save file is well over that at this point, post-game.

• 36:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Jason, are you managing your expectations?

• 36:18Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, something that's worth noting is that like a lot of the playthrough is you, the game gives you multiple reasons to revisit locations. There are a lot of side quests. There are a lot of just kind of activities that you're given or incentives you're given to do the same areas over and over again. I'm guessing that there's a way to beat the game and significantly less than 240 hours. It's just if you want to see everything and keep experimenting. And it's also worth noting, and I want to talk to you a little bit about this, Evan, is that the, the joy of this game comes from going out with this team of four cats and picking abilities for them and figuring out over the course of that run, how those abilities can synergize, how you can break everything, how you can destroy enemies as quickly as possible.

• 37:03Jason Schreier?

  By making them explode, like finding, summoning enemies from their corpses and then getting an ability that, that, or sorry, summoning spawned allies from their corpses and then getting an ability that damages enemies when they kill those spawned allies. So then you can just kind of send them as cannon fodder and make all your enemies blow up. There are all sorts of insane combos you can play around with. I guess I'm in that question for you is at what point did you realize this, this was such a heavily systems-driven synergy-based game? Was that the plan from the get-go or did that just come about as you kept adding new skills and items to the game?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  It was the plan from the get-go because what we were kind of attempting was a Magic the Gathering foundation. Like, the core of the game is Magic the Gathering. It's a very Richard Garfield design.

• 37:50Jason Schreier?

  That explains a lot.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  As many systems as you can possibly fit into this world, right? And then you just throw pieces of the systems, like you, if, if you've got a thousand two hundred abilities and then these items and then all these mutations and then all this furniture, as long as there are this cohesive thing and you've got this rule system, like you pointed out, it's like, the other day I was doing a stream with somebody and they were like, oh, there's this, there's a dead body over there and he hits the dead body and some stuff falls out. And he's like, oh, so a dead body's just, just there so you can break them and then stuff spawns? And I'm like, everything you're seeing in the map will be used in about five different ways throughout the game. And we use every single resource you can imagine in this game

• 38:37Speaker 03

  in some way. And most of the time, we don't explicitly say that to you. We just let you figure that out. And that's what Magic does. I mean, it's, it's the very similar design where it's like, this, this one element, like a land or whatever else, will serve a thousand purposes. And when you make a game or a foundation like that, you are allowing people to, it's not full sandbox, but more playground. You've got all these structures and stuff that they've built and you're allowing somebody to be like, here. Here, I'm gonna give you this really weird design. And it's like, oh, this actually fits into this part of the playground. Wait, no, it fits over here, too.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  And I can swing from here, you know, that it creates this like a living, breathing world where you feel smart and clever because you are being smart and clever. Because I didn't come up with those ideas because I don't even know they exist. It's just in the game.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  It's vast enough that I don't know if everything's gonna work as you would assume, but most of the time it kind of does. But yeah.

• 39:42Kirk Hamilton?

  I really like Sandbox versus Playground. Like a Playground has more structure. It's a little bit more mechanical and a Sandbox is just open. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hang on to that. That's pretty good.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  I made that up.

• 39:54Kirk Hamilton?

  I'll be sure to credit you anytime I mention it.

• 39:58Jason Schreier?

  Well, put, yeah, it's really exciting. Well, like I said, we'll get into this game more in depth on the show next week when we can really talk about it in full. But I am having such a good time with it. So yeah, I can, I can see why you've been enjoying playing it for all of these years. Do you have a favorite kind of combination or synergy or cats, cats lineup that you particularly enjoy playing around with?

• 40:24Speaker 03

  I'm a fan of nude runs. So like no items, like sometimes I'll just force myself to take abilities early that I wouldn't normally or don't usually take just so I could see. Me and Tyler will go back and forth on abilities and argue about power level. And we both have very different perspectives on everything. And I'll be like, I don't think this is any good. Like this doesn't seem worth this mana. And he's like, well, I'll give you 17 different abilities that it combos with that would make it insane. And I'm like, okay, is that, that is strong. I guess you're right. So there's, there's just a lot of going back and forth on that. And we whittled down and we try to, we try to power balance as early as possible.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  So we don't have to do a ton of that after lunch, but.

• 41:13Jason Schreier?

  I mean, that is the part that seems insane to me, just the balance of it all, because there's just so much. And like, I mean, even knowing what the right mana cost for an ability should be, how much damage it should be, how difficult a fight should be when you can take it on in so many different possible ways. Like, how do you even know what the right difficulty level for a boss is when you could come in with a gang of cats that just like takes it out easily and you could come in where with no way to possibly beat it?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  You have to allow for people to, that was a hard thing, too. It's like, how, how much control do we want over this? We don't want, if you find a combination that you, that it that takes three different things, and you feel so big brain because you figured out how to break the game and go infinite with these three items. I think I'd be an asshole if I took that away from you. You know, I want you to be able to do that. And the way the game is structured, usually you can only do that once or twice. And then you've got to move on to the next thing. And I think it's okay. I mean, I think that's why people, a lot of, a lot of people play Isaac is to get busted and just kind of walk through the game destroying everything. And we don't want to take that away from people, especially with this game, because they usually have to work for

• 42:25Speaker 03

  it. And we just have to let, sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's okay to completely walk in and destroy a boss like it's nothing. But most of the time, you'll usually be in situations where it's a challenge and it's a nail biting fight that you can just barely, barely finish or die. And you lose all the items. You gotta start over.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I've really noticed about it. I'm not as far as Jason, but I find the game is still pretty fun and compelling, even when I feel that the forces are stacked against me, or even if I die and lose all my cats, because I'm like, okay, well, what can I learn from that run? And I was kind of curious, like, how you thought about designing a game that's also fun to lose? Because when something's run based, you obviously want the player to not be giving up, or, and really fully understanding, like, oh, you have a lot of chances. And like, how many cats should the player feel like they're getting, like, one cat a night, for example? How often do the cats copulate? Like, what kind of went into that process of like, helping the early game not feel too hard?

• 43:26Speaker 03

  I think, I think going in, and it's misconception that we're still trying to kind of get over, most people will see the turn-based structure of this game and think, This is like Into the Breach. This is like whatever the last hardcore structured turn-based strategy game that they played was. And what I don't want is to people to think this is chess because it's not. It's not chess. It's forgiving enough that lets you experiment and lose and be okay with it. I think that's what really makes it special, too. And designing a game and trying to pitch a game that says like, listen, it's this really structured game you can play and it's really structured and you can go crazy with it. And if you're really smart, then you

• 44:06Speaker 03

  probably just destroy it. But sometimes shit's gonna happen. And that's life. And that's just the way it works. And you need to... Some of the best aspects of this game, and it's such a hard sell, are recovering from something bad happening and making the best out of a really bad situation. Because then you're like, I'm so smart. Like, the game tried to fuck me over, and no, I took it back. I took back control and I made it work. It's like, I saw my wife get... She's playing a lot right now. And I saw her get blood frenzy. Now, blood frenzy is one of the most harsh disorders in the game that you can get. And what it does is, somebody with

• 44:50Speaker 03

  blood frenzy, when they kill something, they will get an extra turn every single time they kill a unit. And during that extra turn, they will have madness, which means they cannot differentiate friend from foe. They will just go on a killing spree. And it is terrible. And usually you'll strategize and be like, okay, well, as long as I don't kill. That's the rule. Don't kill something. So I can go around and damage stuff and not kill it, let the other guys kill it, and you can play that way, too. But my wife threw the murderer to the back lines, and then let him just destroy it all. And then just cross your fingers at the end, because eventually he's coming. He's coming back. And you can strategize around that. I

• 45:33Speaker 03

  think she purposefully like made him slower, so he couldn't move as much. So he couldn't come back and kill all of her cats. And there are literally hundreds of these different disorders that are just like that, that have a big downside, but have a silver lining that... If you don't give up and you try to make it work for you, you can just recover in a grand way that will make you feel great.

• 45:58Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, there are some incredible combinations with some of these, even the negative disorders. There's one, for example, that you can get that is, I believe, called Savant Syndrome, which ramps up, gets one of your character's intelligence to something like 18, 20, which is pretty high. That kind of what's considered good is a seven or an eight. So 18 or 20 is remarkable. But it lowers all their other stats. But then if you combine that, if you're lucky enough to combine that with a passive ability called, what is it, baseline, something baseline?

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 46:29Jason Schreier?

  That that makes it so none of your stats can go below five, then that makes up for the downside of the Savant Syndrome. And then you have this massive beefy super cat. I think one of the interesting things about this game is actually learning to let go because you'll go on this run and you'll have four cats that you turn into this powerhouse team that wrecks every boss and you're just doing awesome. And then you bring them back and they're retired and you can't take them out again. And all you can do with them is either breed and then there's one more mechanic, I won't spoil, that you can use them for later, or you could donate them, get rid of them. And I think learning to let go of your powerful teams is something that is an interesting aspect of this game. Typical of Rogue Likes,

• 47:11Jason Schreier?

  I suppose, but there's something about this one where you really got to learn to let go.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of people initially went and be like, I don't want my cat to die. I'm gonna fall in love with this cat or these cats and I'm not going to want them to die. And it's like, please make it so they don't die. And it's like, you have no idea how important that is. Like, it's so important that there's permanence here, that you care, because you'll start caring about these cats. I just had a cat start going on a murderous rampage in the house and killing a bunch of cats. And I'm gonna take him and put him in another room. But, but it's like, oh, my God, you just killed like a significant, a significant person just because you're an aggressive cat and maybe the room was too crowded. And it happened and I felt it. And it's important. That's why those sort of things are important.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  It's also important just because, once you kind of shed that and kind of get over that, you sort of have a lot more fun with the game and you start seeing it less of, these are my cats and I love them, and more of, this is my bloodline. This is my history. This is the giant.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  DNA strand that I've made and I don't know if you have it in the game, but Tink unlocks it. The family tree. Do you have a family tree? Yeah, the family tree like really brings it all together because you'll be playing through probably depending on where you where you go, but at least for the first 15, 20 hours of the game. And you don't even know that there's a full family tree that's behind the scenes that you'll unlock and you can see all your past cats from the very beginning, as long as you know, you haven't had a full wipe or or whatever else, which I think is really neat.

• 48:48Jason Schreier?

  You can see all the inbreeding along the way. And sometimes, sometimes you wind up slightly inbred. Sometimes you're very inbred. Yeah, a couple more questions and then we'll have to go. One is, I want to talk about, actually, we'll save, we'll save DLC and future plans for last. But I actually want to ask about Super Meat Boy 3D, because something that has happened recently is that that game was announced, the 3D version of Super Meat Boy. Seems like it's imminent. We haven't heard much from it in a little bit, but it's supposed to be out this year at some point, early part of 2026. How do you feel about a game that you had such an intimate creation in just kind of continuing in new forms? What's that like for you?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  It's odd. I played it. I played, I played, I played the demo. I've never played forever. I don't think I ever will. It's just, I can't, I don't think I can bring myself to do it. But I played 3D. And there were some things that I was fairly impressed with. I was mostly impressed until I jumped. If that makes sense. If you've played it, I think you know what I'm talking about.

• 49:51Jason Schreier?

  I have not, but jumping in 3D games can be.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, jumping in three. So that, I mean, the first thing I thought, I'm trying not to talk shit, man. I'm not disparaging anyone here. But yeah, no, I, I would say, if somebody said, hey, and of course they have, you should make a 3D Meat Boy gamer, 3D platformer. My first response was if I made Meat Boy 3D platformer, I don't think I could make that good. That's very hard. Very, very, very, very hard. And for such a very, very, very, very, very hard thing to accomplish, I think they did a pretty okay job. And the art is interesting. There are certain no nos I wouldn't do. Like, it's weird to not be any, I have

• 50:35Speaker 03

  no control. I'm just watching whatever. This isn't mine anymore. And definitely a lot of choices that I'm just kind of like, hmm.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Do they think I would do that? Or are they just doing that? I don't know. Um, I don't know. And then it's weird too to get people like, being like, I saw, you know, you're releasing two games this year. And it's like, well, no. I'm not, um.

• 50:58Jason Schreier?

  It's awkward.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  But, um, I don't know. I've got a few little birdies that tell me things and, um, and I, I wish the best for everyone involved in the project. I mean, I, um, it's, it, from what I've seen, it seems like it's, it's a, uh, I think they're called, um, slugger fly or something. Um, and, um, head up. And I know, uh, Dieter personally, he's published a bunch of my games and I think he's kind of heading the whole thing. And I, you know, wish him the best. But it is very odd. It's very odd to, to see. I don't know. I kind of had a really profound realization though, through it, when I realized like,

• 51:37Speaker 03

  if I would have stayed at Team Meet and if I would have made things work, I don't think I would have ever been happy with a sequel. And I don't think I ever would have made one. So if people, what people want is more Meat Boy, maybe it's better that I'm not there and I'm not involved. Because I don't, I don't even know if I'm gonna make another Binding of Isaac, you know, if I'm being real, like, unless I come up with some fucking phenomenal idea that I want to waste 10 years on. I think, I don't know. I think it's done. I think I'd just much rather make something new than something that I've already made.

• 52:07Jason Schreier?

  So yeah, that is a good segue for our final question, which is, it sounds like you want to keep working on Mewgenics. You said five, six years to come, uh, before. But yeah, what is your, is your idea here to like, keep working on new stuff in addition to like Mewgenics DLC? Do you want to just kind of dedicate yourself to Mewgenics for the next decade? Like, what does your kind of future plan look like now?

• 52:30Speaker 03

  The only future plan that I have is I need to be a dad. I need to be a father. Um, I need to be a husband and I'm, I have not been, um, as available as I would like to be for at least the past year or two. And, um, I need to, I have two homeschooled girls and, uh,

• 52:49Jason Schreier?

  How old are they?

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Five and 10.

• 52:52Jason Schreier?

  And what are your favorite traits that you've bred into them?

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Well, one of them is ADHD and the other is autism. So.

• 53:01Jason Schreier?

  There you go. That is exactly what.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Dyslexia, dyslexia, the oldest one, dyslexia. Um, and with that comes homeschooling.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  No, but she's a fiercely funny and creative girl and very, very smart. She taught herself how to read by herself by putting subtitles on YouTube and watching movies with subtitles. And it was just kind of phenomenal, like, because growing up with a dyslexia absolutely sucks and you feel not good in school and absolutely stupid. And it's nice to have the means to be able to not torture her and force her to do the way, do things the way society is averaging them. Because, you know, it turns out when left to her own devices, she's very good at figuring things out by herself. And that's really how she learns is by doing.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  But yeah, so very creative, very funny and very challenging. You'd never believe it, but they like to push the envelope. They like to challenge authority. They like to go against the grain and I don't know where, I don't know where they would have got that. I don't know, I don't know who instilled that in them. But yeah, those are the traits that I bred into them.

• 54:24Jason Schreier?

  But so, yeah, so you're, you're going to spend some time being a dad, hopefully still being able to do some eugenic stuff in addition to that.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure it out, you know? I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure it out and I just need the dust to settle on this and kind of, if I fucking, if my wife hears me say I'm gonna start a new project, she's gonna fucking kill me. Like, it's, this is not fun for her. I mean, she's, she's enjoying it to the best of her ability and we have help when we have help. But I'll tell you this, any game in the movie has been back. They've been filming this and I hear the interviews from the other room and there's a lot of,

• 55:03Jason Schreier?

  Oh no.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  There's a lot of, when is this game gonna get fucking done? I want this game fucking done and I want my husband back.

• 55:12Jason Schreier?

  How often are they, are they filming you? Like, have they been filming you for years?

• 55:17Speaker 03

  They come back tomorrow. They, so yeah, they've been, they've been filming me on, they filmed the release of The End Is Nigh. They filmed a follow-up for The Binding of Isaac. So they came down in like 2012 or 2013 and then again in like 20.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Seventeen or eighteen. And then more recently this year, they've been down here three or four times. Filming. I don't know. I think they're trying to figure it out, too. They're trying to figure out what, what they want to do. But it's kind of crazy because they're like, the more, the more I talk to them, the more they're like, you know, do you remember this thing that happened in 2009 at GDC? And I'm like, yeah. And they're like, you know, we were filming you. And I was like, what? You fucking, and they're like, yeah, we couldn't put it in the movie, though, because it didn't make sense. But we filmed this and like the first, like, the first time that they had ever filmed me and Danielle was when I lost to Monaco for Super Meat Boy Monaco and the IGF.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  And I guess that like Danielle was like consoling me and the first shot is like, is her turning and like, like, shooting evil lasers and saying, like, telling them to get out of here. We didn't know who they were.

• 56:36Jason Schreier?

  Well, it's, it's worth noting, we talked about this on the, on our show a couple of months ago, but it's worth noting that of the people prominently featured in Indian in the movie, Phil Fish has just kind of disappeared. John Blow has become polarizing, we'll say. And you're just making hit games and just doing your own thing.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Hey, man. I mean, I'm sure there's people who, whatever.

• 56:59Jason Schreier?

  It's cool. So Mewgenics is out February 10th. It'll be, have been out by the time this episode airs. I highly recommend it. Emmen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 57:11Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, thanks, man. All right, we are going to take a break and we'll be back with one more thing.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  Hey, Alexis. Hey, Ella. What animal has the most teeth? I would guess a shark. A snail. No, snails don't have teeth. They have thousands and they are freaky looking. No, I don't want that to be true. Okay. Did you know that the hippocampus in your brain is named after the half horse, half fish sea creature found in Greek mythology? I didn't know that, but we're meant to be doing animal trivia and hippocampus isn't a real animal. Well, that doesn't matter on Comfort Creatures. You're right. It doesn't matter at all. Comfort Creatures is a cozy show for lovers of animals of all shapes and sizes, real and unreal. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then join us every Thursday for new episodes on MaximumFun.org.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  Are you a celebrity? Are you searching for meaning, connection, and a little levity these days? Hi, I'm Kumail Nanjiani, actor, writer, and yes, a celebrity too. And I've got four words for you. Bullseye with Jesse Thorne.

• 58:17Speaker 05

  Are you tired of junkets? Red carpets? Sick of the endless spicy snacks you have to eat? Do you want to connect with someone who gets your work and laugh with you a little? Join me, Andre 3000, Tom Hanks, Tina Fey, and many more, and become a guest on Bullseye with Jesse Thorne from NPR and Maximum Fun.

• 58:39Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. Thank you again to Emmen McMillan for coming on the show. That was super fun. Let's do some one more things before we say goodbye. Kirk, why don't you start? What's your one more thing?

• 58:50Kirk Hamilton?

  My one more thing is a game that I've been playing that is incredibly cool. A game called Cairn. Have either of you played Cairn? Surely you're both aware of it.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  I am aware of it. I've not played it, though.

• 59:02Kirk Hamilton?

  So this is a rock climbing game from The Gamebakers, who have made kind of a lot of games. This is an indie studio that made Fury, among other things. And let's see, what else? Oh, yeah, they made Haven. So they've made games that I have not actually played. I did not get into Fury, though I know some people really dig it. But they've been around for a while. And this is their new one. It's a game about rock climbing that is really, really cool. I heard enough people on enough podcasts talking about it that I thought I'd just give it a run since I had it installed and have been just totally bowled over by it. It kind of was exactly the game that I was looking to play. This game tells the story of Ava, who is your character.

• 59:47Kirk Hamilton?

  She is a very stoic and hard-to-read, at least at first, woman who is obsessed with climbing this mountain, a very dangerous mountain that kills people. It has just killed tons of people who have attempted to summit it. And she's sort of leaving behind her relationship and her friends to go and attempt this incredibly dangerous Thing and and that's kind of the narrative framework. And this is actually a narrative game to an extent that I didn't totally appreciate going in. And I'm really enjoying it so far. I think it kind of gets at the heart of some of the emotional and philosophical ideas behind rock climbing in a way that I have found really cool.

• 1:00:28Kirk Hamilton?

  But the heart of the game is the mechanics and that is what I've found so amazing about it. I've played like coming up on a couple of hours, so I'm not super far, but I know it's not like an incredibly long game, but I'm well up the mountain and I'm making some pretty good progress. And so I feel like I can at least recommend it because I just love what I've played and I'm definitely going to keep going. But I am excited to see how the mechanics kind of develop. So this is a rock climbing game in the vein of Joussant, if the two of you remember that game, which was actually one of my favorite games from a couple of years ago when that came out. That was another game that kind of focused on the mechanics of rock climbing to an extent that you won't see in all of these other, you know, these Sony games, for example, God

• 1:01:11Kirk Hamilton?

  of War or Horizon, where you just hold down a button and you go up the wall. Uncharted is another example. Like, we've all climbed up a cliff in a video game a million times to the point where it doesn't even feel exciting anymore. And for a long time in an Uncharted game, this has kind of been the weird disconnect where these animations are so kind of engrossing and you're watching Nathan Drake hang by a single hand, freehand climbing over a cliff. And you just kind of can't feel the feeling that you, he must be feeling, it just, for me at least, it does not really connect that feeling, that thrill that I should be feeling.

• 1:01:44Jason Schreier?

  Do you remember they tried to like do a more elaborate climbing system for Uncharted 4? I wrote about this in Blood, Sword and Pixels, my first book, because that was like a big prototype phase during Amy Henning's version especially. They were really trying to do like pitons and like all sorts of crazy stuff, but it didn't wind up working for various reasons.

• 1:02:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I remember reading about that and it makes sense because it's just that's the kind not the kind of game they're making. It can't quite support that sort of really dense mechanical like naughtiness when you're when you kind of.

• 1:02:12Jason Schreier?

  It interrupts the flow of the rest of the game. Yeah.

• 1:02:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. It's just the wrong kind of game where a game like Karen or previously, I mean, Jusant also. And I would say Death Stranding is also very much in this lineage. These games demonstrate that if you build the game around the simple, but also like deceptively complex or deceptively simple. I always forget which one it is, the the simple seeming, but actually quite complex mechanics of walking across rocks or climbing up a wall. Then you can make a really amazing game. It's just you kind of have to build your game around it a little bit more. That is what they have done for Karen. When it starts, it looks like it's almost going to be like a Bennett Foddy. You know, like baby steps or getting over it. You begin to climb. Ava begins to climb the wall and you start out in a training course and you'll.

• 1:02:59Kirk Hamilton?

  I at least ate shit on the very first climbing attempt, but then I actually have been surprised. I've really picked this up pretty quickly and I've been listening to people talk about this game and just following some impressions. And it's pretty variable. There are people who find it really, really intimidating and difficult and people who don't. I've found at least for my part that I am doing pretty well. I have a kind of an intuitive sense of how this is supposed to work. I'm not much of a rock climber. I'm a little too tall. It's like just hard for me physically, but I've done some rock climbing. And I've I have some friends who are really into it. And so I think part of it is just maybe a little bit of that kind of physical awareness, because this is a very physical game.

• 1:03:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Ava walks up to the wall. You press the square button. At least that's the initial mapping. And she just puts her hand, you know, onto one of the sort of, you know, outgrowths on the climbing. This isn't a climbing gym, so we're not on the mountain yet. She puts her hand on the outgrowth. And then you're kind of just using the stick to move her right hand around. So the hand is kind of doing this co-op looking. It's a little awkward because it's moving to just every direction in a radius. And you just move it over until it's on, you know, a little ledge and then you press square and her hand. Automatically grabs that little ledge and then her foot starts moving around. And this is where it really starts to look kind of goofy sometimes because the foot is like going way up or stretching around and it almost looks like cartoonish.

• 1:04:23Kirk Hamilton?

  But then, as you place it and you begin to move her, it stops feeling cartoonish. And actually, the more I've played, the more I just really feel completely connected to this other person's physical body in a way that feels very believable and cool. And I'm watching her, you know, she is amazing. I mean, Ava is like strong and agile in ways that I could never relate to. So in some ways, it's like playing a superhero. But it's because what she's doing is so hard, you know, when she has two feet like wedged into a tiny chimney on a cliff and she's leaning her, you know, physical body over to the right to brace as she pulls her left arm up and then stretches her left leg and then can kind of thrust up to catch.

• 1:05:07Kirk Hamilton?

  These moves feel incredibly real to me. It's a very visceral game, I would say. And then the effect of playing this game, especially once you get going, is that it just locks your attention on what Ava is doing and just it locks my focus. I am totally locked in the minute I'm climbing, you know, a cliff. So the difficulty in this game arises from like her stamina. A lot of these systems are happening in the background. It's a very complex simulation of her physiology and her strength, her hands, her stamina. Actually, there's a whole survival system I'll talk about in a second where you're like eating food and managing her hydration and her rest and stuff.

• 1:05:47Kirk Hamilton?

  But even just in the physics of it, you know, her, her body on the wall, like that is being very deeply simulated. But a lot of it is just kind of communicated intuitively, a lot through her breathing, actually. And then her arms will start to shake if she's holding an untenable position. So watching this happen, you begin, you already feel, or I already feel so connected to her as I'm watching her move. And then you're hearing her breathing as it's picking up and she's getting a little more stressed and she's under a little bit more duress. She's maybe holding on to a really narrow ledge that hurts. Her hand and she's pulling over and kind of trying to brace. And it just, it makes me focus even more because you, you know, if you push her too far, she'll fall.

• 1:06:31Kirk Hamilton?

  And if you've stuck a piton in, you can, you don't necessarily die, but you can lose a lot of progress. There's a whole, like, there's a whole piton system where you can use it kind of as a checkpoint, but you have a limited number of them, so you can start to run out. So the whole vibe, like, the flow of the game is just this slow process up a series of cliffs that you're really having to read organically. Like, it's not, there are no yellow markers. There's no, you know, detective vision that highlights every grabbable point. You really just look at it. It's a kind of a cel-shaded art style, I guess. So you can kind of freely move the camera around and you just look and think, okay, well, I see there's this little, there are these two, you know, not a chimney, but I don't know what you call it exactly, like a diagonal.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  A crevice?

• 1:07:17Kirk Hamilton?

  It's, yeah, I guess maybe a crevice. Like, it's like a kind of a, a bit of, you have a wall on one side and a little bit of a textured surface on the other. And you know she can push against the wall and go up there. And then, something that's happened to me every time I've tried to rock climb, there inevitably comes a point where you look up and you just think, I don't understand how I am going to get past this next five feet. Because there's just not an obvious handhold. It just is going to require some kind of crazy move. And so, a lot of times, I kind of just throw Ava at it because I'm like, well, she's really strong, so we'll see how this goes. And you can wind up over your head. And when that happens, when she's shaking and she's panicking and you're trying to hold on, it gets really, really intense. And you're like, oh, my God, oh, my God.

• 1:08:03Kirk Hamilton?

  I find myself, as I play, this will not surprise either of you, just talking to her. I'm like, you got this, you got this. Don't die. And she'll, and she'll talk back to me. And sometimes when she, when I do a really smart move that gives her purchase, she'll be like, Good, like that. Like, she'll be talking to herself, but I feel like she's telling me that I'm doing a good job. So I feel so connected to her, like, in this very, um, like, a kind of, in a visceral way, in a really deep way, just because I'm kind of coaching her through this incredibly physically difficult thing in a very dangerous scenario. And it's so cool. I mean, I, you know, it's made me connect to the story so much more because I just feel so, like, elementally connected to her. And I find it to just be

• 1:08:48Kirk Hamilton?

  this amazing experience. I haven't felt something like this in a video game, this kind of a relationship with a protagonist, in a long time, where I've just been watching them and guiding them through this incredibly physically grueling and very precise process. And that alone has just been amazing. My friends, who are rock climbers, talk a lot about why they like to do it. And a big part of it is that you're required to focus. You have to be in the moment. And hobbies like that are really cool, right? I find that sometimes when I'm really practicing music, I can feel that way. And I really like that kind of an activity. This game really simulates that feeling of just, like, I have to think about what's coming next. There is no time for me to stop. I can't daydream. I can't

• 1:09:31Kirk Hamilton?

  space out. I've got to, like, lock in and just, we have to get to the top of this rock. And it's really, really cool. I'm finding it to just be like, an emotionally and mentally rewarding game. And I'm so excited to learn more about just sort of what's driving this person to do this crazy thing, to take this risk, and to get to the top of the mountain. I think it's gonna be a really rewarding adventure. And I'm loving it so far. So I really just, like, I'm blown away by this game. For me, at least, it's exactly the kind of game that I like. And I'm finding it to just be a really enchanting and engrossing experience.

• 1:10:07Jason Schreier?

  Well, you just described where you're staring at something and you're like, I have no idea how am I gonna get past this, but I'm just gonna throw myself against it. It sounds like a good metaphor for the creative process in general.

• 1:10:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Jason Schreier?

  Just making something.

• 1:10:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's definitely a game that lends itself to metaphor. I think that's true.

• 1:10:21Jason Schreier?

  Climbing is the ultimate metaphor. Cool, Cairn. It sounds pretty cool. Are you playing on Steam Deck?

• 1:10:28Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I'm playing it on PC. I gather it has some performance issues on Steam Deck, but I haven't tried it, so I don't really know. But it's cool. I'm playing on PC on just like on kind of the monitor. It's nice to really be able to see everything because there is a lot of that kind of reconnaissance where I'm just really thinking through, okay, how am I going to get from here to here to here? And because you're really looking at shadow, you know, well, that looks like it's coming out a little farther that ledge because there's more shadow. Like, it's nice to have a little more detail and have a slightly bigger screen.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 1:10:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Maddie, what's your one more thing?

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  My one more thing is a movie that I just watched that came out in 2025. It's called Code Three, and it was written by a couple people, one of whom was a paramedic. And that's what the movie is about, which is to say, somebody who works in an ambulance, rescuing people, but who isn't really considered a medical professional legally, but also saves people's lives every day, multiple times a day as part of their job, and is, I would say, underpaid. And that is a significant kind of piece of this movie. The movie is kind of a dark comedy. It stars Rainn Wilson, who people probably know as Dwight

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  from The Office. And in this movie, he plays a really different character because he's like an older, super burned out, bitter, paramedic who's been kind of like underappreciated, but is also like the best at what he does compared to like all of his coworkers and knows it. So he's kind of irritating, but also is like indisputably extraordinarily good at what he does. But also, it's Rainn Wilson, so he has that dry wit and is, he talks to camera a lot in this movie, which is like a The Office technique. But it's really different here because there's so much darkness inherent in the job. Like, a lot of times, they're just literally discovering dead bodies. And you don't really think about like how much of the paramedic job is like

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  that, I don't think, until you see something like this. And I think Rainn Wilson really sells that mixture of comedy and darkness that's part of the job.

• 1:12:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Is this like a mockumentary style, or is it more like Fleabag thing where he just starts talking to the camera?

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Well, it's a Fleabag thing. It's like the, yeah, like Fleabag's a good example of people have seen that show where like, it's not a mockumentary. It's like his diary, think of it that way, like the him talking to camera doesn't take place in our reality, but it's like as though he's telling us about his day. And it kind of chronicles this one day that he has with his coworkers and it's like a particularly important day. And there's like a few other kind of notable comedians in it, like Yvette Nicole Brown and Rob Riggle are in it. But it's mostly Rainn Wilson's movie. And I really liked it. I thought it was pretty interesting. I wouldn't say it's like riotously funny, but it reminded me of what it's like to be a paramedic. I've never done it myself, but so I graduated college in 2008, which was like the recession

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  that we all remember. And I had several friends who ended up becoming paramedics, EMTs during this time because, specifically because you get paid for training. So these were friends of mine who couldn't find a job at the time and they were like, well, no one will hire me, but at least like I can become an EMT and they'll pay me for training. And I heard a ton from them about how difficult it was. And I kind of watched them over the years, like get really burned out by it. And it really feels like a young person's game in a lot of ways and like one of those roles that's invisible, but that is really important at the same time. And this movie reminded me of that and I thought it was pretty cool that a paramedic worked on it and that it ends up being pretty accurate.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  And I went on, there's like paramedic subreddits and I was reading some of their takes on the movie and at least the threads I found, people really dug it. So if this is something you don't know a lot about and you kind of want like Rainn Wilson to like take you on like the kind of dark sarcastic journey through it that will sort of help the medicine go down, but also genuinely teach you something about this underserved job. It's called Code Three and it's a, it's a really interesting movie and I liked it.

• 1:14:43Jason Schreier?

  Code Vein 2 came out this week, so you could play Code Vein 2 while watching Code 2.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:14:50Kirk Hamilton?

  How does it compare tonally to The Pit?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  It's, you know, The Pit is so romanticized compared to this movie in that the paramedics in this are often really cast off by the doctors in the ER that they meet up with. And those doctors are presented as like being annoyed by how many people they're bringing in, which I think is probably closer. I mean, The Pit depicts some of that, but I think there's much more of a symbiotic relationship depicted on The Pit. I mean, I'm sure it depends on which ER your EMTs happen to be taking their patients to, and like, everyone's experiences are different. But in this movie, there's kind of like a acrimonious relationship between the EMTs and the hospitals

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  that are like, "We don't have the space for these people." And they're like, "But you're the closest hospital." There's a lot of like tension around that in the movie. So it's interesting. I thought about The Pit a lot while watching it too, and was like, "Wow." I'm watching a lot of ER stuff right now and like really thinking about this part of our culture. Yeah.

• 1:15:53Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like, maybe there's a feeling of emergency that we're all feeling or something.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  It's almost like these are people who were burned out recently en masse by some sort of social phenomenon that might make them wanna like make art about their experiences.

• 1:16:06Jason Schreier?

  Can't imagine what. My one more thing is a TV show called The Chair Company that I watched actually a few weeks ago, but haven't talked about until now. This is a show by Tim Robinson and Zach Kean and the people who also made a TV show called I Think You Should Leave. Tim Robinson always pretty much plays the same person and he does the same in this TV show, where he is a ridiculous person who fixates on things to an extent that it's very fun to watch, but would be very unpleasant to go through in real life. Have either of you seen this show?

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  I haven't. I'm excited to hear about it.

• 1:16:45Kirk Hamilton?

  I've watched, uh, three episodes and then I fell off, not for any real reason. I think it was because you told me you were waiting to watch it and I thought it would be fun to watch with you.

• 1:16:55Jason Schreier?

  Sorry, I didn't tell you.

• 1:16:57Kirk Hamilton?

  No, no, whatever. But, uh, I, I will come back to it. I enjoyed it. It's a little excruciating, but, but enjoyable.

• 1:17:03Jason Schreier?

  It is excruciating. Yeah. It's, it's hard to watch. Okay. So, um, if you're familiar with I Think You Should Leave, I mean, it's essentially the same sort of humor in that it's very much like, people, usually Tim Robinson's character, just dragging things on for way too long, making everybody around him uncomfortable.

• 1:17:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Like if, if I Think You Should Leave did a paranoid thriller, you know?

• 1:17:24Jason Schreier?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:17:25Kirk Hamilton?

  It's an interesting mix.

• 1:17:26Jason Schreier?

  Which is interesting. And, and it turned out, of course, that the, the conspiracy theory was real in some way. The extent of it, I won't spoil, but, uh, but the end of the first episode, it's very clear. So, the premise of this is that Tim Robinson works at this office job, just kind of typical,

• 1:17:44Jason Schreier?

  corporate America office job. I think they like develop property, like they're like a real estate firm. And he is promoted. He's supposed to be leading this big shopping mall project and he gives this presentation and he sits down in a chair and the chair collapses and he falls and everybody laughs at him. And I think, uh, in the real world, if that's happened to someone, they would be embarrassed and they would try to laugh it off and then they try to move on with their lives. Maybe it would be a running joke or something, but that would be the end of it. In this world, Tim Robinson starts looking into the company that makes these chairs and becomes convinced that there is a conspiracy or, uh, involving the chairs that made it so this chair collapsed because it was hollow in some way.

• 1:18:25Jason Schreier?

  And, uh, he, he becomes fixated on this obsession of figuring out what really happened to the chair and the company behind it. And he starts getting into, like digging into the company behind it and finds out that they're a shell company that like doesn't really exist. And then he goes on this rabbit hole for eight episodes of trying to figure out what the deal is. We also meet his wife, Lake Ball, and his family, his kids. And learn the story with all of them and have some fun side plots involving involving them as well and involving um his his daughter um who is uh who is uh getting married uh has a fiance and there's some interesting plots there. Um his daughter is queer, getting

• 1:19:08Jason Schreier?

  married to this woman who uh has her own kind of outlandish personality. And yeah, it's a really fun watch. I I don't know if it's like, I don't know if I would recommend it as thoroughly as I would recommend I Think You Should Leave, because I think this style of humor is better suited to sketch comedy than it is to an eight-episode thriller show where each episode is 30 minutes. And there were points, also Kirk, where I found myself not bouncing off, because I stuck with it, but like wanting to stop watching because it was so hard to keep watching.

• 1:19:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's worth mentioning, like, his life is falling apart. Like, he isn't just going down this rabbit hole. His his whole world is unraveling and he can't stop. And so it it is, I mean, he's an I Think You Should Leave character, right? And that's what an I Think You Should Leave version of Tim would do. So yeah, there's this feeling of just like, oh, my God, like, how much worse can this get for this guy? How much more damage can he cause to his life? And of course, the answer is always more, more than you'd think.

• 1:20:04Jason Schreier?

  Right. And of course, like, his family, it seems, it's actually, it's never really explained whether he's done things like this before. I guess he he kind of has.

• 1:20:12Kirk Hamilton?

  He almost has to have. He's such a weirdo.

• 1:20:14Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, but it's it's it's not really explained. I guess I should phrase it this way. It's not explained why his wife puts up with him. But there is some interesting kind of story involving his wife and her own just kind of like business and and uh just kind of the deal she made. And there's some stuff, actually, Kirk, that you haven't seen left that's interesting between their families. But anyway, but like, this guy, his name is Ron, Tim Robinson's character. He he is uh he's quite a character. Um, there's some side characters also who are just out of this world. It is very much like a cartoony show, like a sketch comedy, kind of like, sketch comedy combined with a thriller, which is a really interesting mix. Anyway, I recommend it. It's not quite as good as I Think You Should Leave, but it's fun. It's fun to watch and, or I guess, part fun, part excruciating to watch.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll probably watch it. I I love Tim Robinson. And I don't know what it is about that guy. I am obsessed. I'm obsessed with whatever kind of comedy he does.

• 1:21:05Kirk Hamilton?

  I can look at him just sitting there and I will just start laughing. Like, he can just be sitting still, not doing anything. And it's funny.

• 1:21:12Jason Schreier?

  He's just got this this magnetic, physical presence that is just impossible to look away from.

• 1:21:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Jason Schreier?

  And so, yeah, I mean, if you like, if you like Tim Robinson, you'll like the show, I think. And I believe it was renewed for a season two, which is good because it ends on a cliffhanger, which is fun. And yeah, I'll leave it at that. The Chair Company, it's on HBO.

• 1:21:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Yeah, I'll watch the rest of it at some point here.

• 1:21:35Jason Schreier?

  I'll check it out. Cool. So that is it for this week's episode. Thank you again to Edmund McMillan. We will talk way more about Mewgenics next week, once you two have had more of a chance to sink in, because there is so much to talk about. It is such a cool game. I love it so much. And I highly recommend that everyone out there go check it out, because it's really, really good. All right, Kirk, Maddie, I'll see you both next time.

• 1:22:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, see you both next week.

• 1:22:02Jason Schreier?

  Bye.

• 1:22:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:23:03Jason Schreier?

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.