Carl: The main thing with the cartridges is, a lot of people are asking is it going to be ROM-based or flash-based, what is the storage medium going to be for the cartridges?

John: Our cartridge interface allows us to use a really wide variety of media.  We can publish on ROM or high-quality flash.  One thing that we want to get across is that we are not using the low quality flash that you might find in, say, USB thumb drives or SD cards.  A lot of that stuff is not intended for long-term storage.  From the better manufacturers it says right there on the package that it is not intended for long term storage.  We want to differentiate and say that, if we are going to release a game on flash memory, it is going to be able to retain that game for at least twenty years.

Mike: And, longer.

John: Yes, and longer.

Steve: Ideally, want to go with ROM, with masked stuff on things. You know, um, so…

John: We have a ROM supplier waiting for us.

[Steve gets excited; Easter egg for audio listeners]

Carl: The next question is, there has been mention on the Facebook page about if there is a bug found after the game is released that the consumer would be asked to return the game and it would be patched and returned.  Is that really a viable option?

Mike: Here is the deal, so, you know, the whole idea is to release games that have been tested.  They are going to go through two levels of testing.  When they come through the developers, you know, we are assuming we are getting a bug free game and yeah, I did say ‘assuming’ but, I mean, that is part of the contract with them–

John (interjecting): –And then we test the heck out of them.

Steve: See, that is another part of the cost. I mean, the test group I am running are going to be heavily beating on this.  These are people I worked with a long time ago.  Industry testers in the game business that just thrash the hell out of this stuff–

John (interjecting): This is exactly the Nintendo model. Back when Nintendo was publishing for the NES, SNES and N64, you know, they would have the developer submit a gold master that the developer has already tested and said yeah, this is going to pass Nintendo’s test, Nintendo’s requirement.  Then Nintendo’s testers, they go through and they do complete play-throughs, and they are looking for bugs.  Anything that is going to significantly affect gameplay and that’s exactly what we are doing here.  That is how we manage it.

Mike: Another thing, Carl, to is–Steve just real quick–is that a lot of the games, many of the games we are bringing out have already been released on other formats.  Whether it be Steam or the PlayStation Store or whatever, and by the time they get to us, you know, all of the bugs should be worked out.  Now, we will have, we hope to have, first-party developed games that we do in-house that we do eventually.  We hope to have–

Steve (interjecting): That is the goal, by the way.  I want everybody to know that, that first party games are the goal here.  These are unique games for our system, right now we don’t have that clout.  Occasionally one will come through and we can build off of that so, you know, that is what we want.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, again, we have contacts.  I have been talking to David Siller who uh, you know David Siller don’t you, Carl?  He was with Martin on at–

Carl: –EGM–

Mike: –EGM originally, he was the first Sushi-X and was in the publishing business, but then David Siller went onto develop, was lead developer on Aero the Acro-Bat and Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, he did Maximo–

John (interjecting): Those are games that we developed at Iguana, by the way.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, he has forty or fifty games to his credit and you know, he knows all of the Japanese developers that are looking for work in fun things.  We have talked with David about bringing a team together and working with Steve, and doing in-house development of new platformers and new characters.  We’ve got these great contacts, these guys are semi-retired, but they still know what to do and how to make a game, and these guys were masterful at it, as was Steve, back in the day.  Again, we have got the connections, we have the contacts.

Steve: Garry Kitchen mentioned [unintelligible word] today.

Mike: Yeah, Garry. Today, Garry Kitchen mentioned wanting to make a game.  We have talked to, um… This thing is going to be real interesting to see what games we can get on this thing from older developers, from new developers and, um, again, I guess the bottom line is that a lot of these games will be debugged because they have already gone through the wringer.  They have gone out, they have been available on other platforms, but never been available on cartridge before.

John: Again, we have the two levels of testing: developer side and publisher side.

Mike: If a catastrophic bug does get out, which again, we are certainly going to try hard to stop that from happening.  Then at that time, we will have some sort of program to get those games returned and fixed and sent back, without a doubt.  If it happens.

John: –games replaced.  We would be on the hook to replace those games.

Mike: Now what the program is, Carl, who pays shipping and all of this is a long way down the road.  We will make it easy for them and inexpensive for them to do it, you know, but the whole goal, again, this is crazy to think in this modern day is to have games that don’t require, you know, any significant fixing.  I mean, I have played games from the Atari to the Genesis to the SNES to the Saturn, I have never in my entire life, up until the last few years when games became Internet connected have I ever had to patch a game.  Ever.  It can happen, guys.

John: Part of our message here is the Internet has made game publishers lazy.

Mike: Yeah.

Steve: I mean, the bottom line, I have never worked at… Any game company I have worked at, the games were so completely tested to death.  I mean, it was just huge, I mean, Kid Chameleon that got tested to death.  All of the Atari games that I worked on, tested to death.  Thrashed before committing to a masked ROM because we had a lead time of two to three months to send the bit pattern over to have it produced.

John: Then there is, of course, the huge expense.

Steve: It couldn’t have any bugs in it at all.  When it got out of our test department, the concept of it being buggy wasn’t even possible.  It just couldn’t be.  The whole test group would be in trouble.  It actually never happened to us in the part of Atari that I was at.  We never had a problem like that.

Mike: That is why, that is one of the benefits of our system, Carl.  If anybody is doubting this, I mean, that is what this is to reverse.  We believe that with these small, these style of games that people are making, they are small teams.  I think a lot of the gaming industry is that, it is so big that you have so many hands stirring the pot.  Nobody knows what one… You know, you’ve got thousands of people working on games, the chances of bugs getting through are huge because you’ve got so many people working on different aspects of the games.  Where as most of these games are small teams, they work together like Steve used to work in a small room at Atari, or a big room Steve, maybe?  They would play each others’ games, and it was a small team developing them so they were infinitely familiar with every aspect of their game.  Unlike a lot of these games today, they do their little part of it and it goes to somebody else, then they do their little part of it and it goes to somebody else.  So, again, just by the fact that our system is playing these smaller–I don’t want to say smaller, but they are smaller than Call of Duty…

Steve: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: There is less room for big mistakes.

Steve: Right.  In all fairness to next gen games, those games are massive undertakings and stuff is going to happen to those.  We get it.  We are not trying to do that. We are trying to do the small kind of stuff that we have seen over the various classic systems, that type of mentality.  Retro stuff, retro, whatever you want to say – stuff you can look at on the screen and go, ‘I can get my hands around that, I know how to play that, I can visually see what is going on and enjoy it!’ and it is not this massive massive development project, you know, that would require some kind of updating just because of the nature.  Some of the games for the PS4 [dogs barking interrupt discussion].

Mike: I think that should answer that question, Carl, hopefully.

Carl: The main part that concerned me, if there is a bug that gets through say it is a catastrophic bug, which party would it be you as the console manufacturer, ya’ll are going to be making the cartridges also right?

Mike: Yes.

Carl: Who would foot the cost if a catastrophic bug did get through?

Mike: Well, obviously the developer would have to—

John (interrupting): What?  No, no, hold on.  Ultimately, if we are the publisher, we are responsible for that first round of costs.  Certainly we are going to have some clauses there where we are sharing the profit with the developers but we are also sharing some of the risk here as well.  That is something we will work out with the individual developers but ultimately our consumers have to know we are on the hook to replace those games and we are going to make it right.

Carl: Okay, that is a fair answer. [very paraphrased question here] I had one more question real quick for you, I don’t see it.  [Carl fumbles a bit with paperwork].  As far as getting a game on ya’ll’s system, how would it work for developers to get their released?  Will developers pre-purchase games and then sell them, or will there be some kind of co-sponsorship deal?

John: Well, we have got several options for publishing.  One of them is certainly a café-style publishing.  If someone wants to, say, develop a game and sell a few, we can certainly go ahead and pre-assemble some blank flash-based cartridges and then program them up and add stickers and do the assembly, or fulfillment pretty much on a “just in time” basis.  That is our café-style publishing option.  If someone wants to make a few cartridges to hand out to his or her friends, yeah, we can have some other options, possibly even giving out some blank cartridges saying ‘Yeah, you can write this on your own on your own system.’.  We will have several different options.

Carl: As far as retail space, obviously I am sure getting into the game stores is a goal for this system, right?  How would that work?

Mike: Here is the deal.  We have been waiting to gauge the demand, Carl, before we start talking to retailers and wasting a bunch of their time, right? We want to see what happens with this thing.  You know, if we turn this thing on and we sell ten, twenty, or thirty thousand of these, we would go, ‘Wow, there is some great demand here!’, I think we could go to retailers and show them there is a market here.  Ultimately we hope that is still what happens. It may take us a year to get there.  But, yeah, that would ultimately be the plan. But also in this day and age of the Internet, you know it is also, could be better for us to sell direct.  We are our own e-commerce site.  Basically have game cartridges we can make on demand, and depending on, again, if it is flash or ROM, typically we ship these games out within one day, we use priority mail, for five bucks they get them in two or three days.  We are talking to Funstock in the UK as well as one of the second biggest e-tailers over there, they have both been asking about this for months.  They both wanted to start taking pre-orders the day our campaign ends because they are getting so much activity over there.  We would love to give our International buyers, when we can, a way to avoid paying those taxes and duties and all of that kind of thing.  Again, after the campaign, if we can work with Funstock and they can stock some systems and games over there so when people over there buy them they don’t have to pay the high shipping and the import duties and all of that.  That would be great.  We do have two retailers over there ready in the wings to do this.  Over here, again, probably for the first year, we would sell direct to consumer and kind of grow our installed user base as quickly as possible.  Now hey, if this thing sells a bunch and GameStop came to us and said ‘We want to buy 500,000 copies,’ and hey, all of a sudden we can lower our price because we got that large volume.  That would be great.  Certainly if the opportunity arises, it is something we would look at.  We have to walk before can crawl.  That is kind of where we are at today and why we are crowdfunding this thing as we speak.

Carl: [fumbles with question]

Mike: Er, crawl before we walk.  I think I just said ‘walk before we crawl’.

Carl: It is sad, there are three other of us in this conversation and no one caught it.

Mike: Nobody caught it.

John: I was biting my tongue.

Steve: I was thinking of something there.

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams

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