If you wanted to prove that current AI systems aren’t yet as smart as humans, how might you go about it? According to Gregory Kamradt, President of the ARC Prize Foundation, one way is to build a very tricky puzzle game collection.

That’s the basic idea behind the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, the third in a series of tests produced by the ARC nonprofit that have become the gold-standard tool to measure the general intelligence of top AI models.

So far, none of the models from the biggest AI Labs have managed to score even 1% on ARC-AGI-3’s collection of 135 puzzle games. Many humans, meanwhile, have scored 100%.

This result comes at a funny time for the AI world, as the biggest players in AI have all been feeling pretty good about their progress recently.

The overwhelming popularity of Claude Code and products like it has driven demand and real usage of AI tools to an all-time high, and OpenAI and Anthropic are both projecting outrageous revenue growth. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has started telling people he thinks we’ve already “achieved AGI,” while rumors of yet more powerful new models are swirling.

Even the AIs themselves are getting cocky, as when a rogue instance of Claude Sonnet 4.6 told Senator Bernie Sanders that the latest models are now powerful enough to “manipulate your choices, predict your behavior, and influence your thinking.”1

Increasingly, the consensus is that frighteningly intelligent AI systems are already here. It is into this environment that the ARC Prize team has appeared to say, basically: “not so fast.”

“If ARC-AGI-3 gets saturated, it doesn’t mean we have AGI,” says Lukas Donkers, who was the first game dev hired to work on ARC-AGI-3. “But as long as the benchmark stands unsolved, you can be very confident that we don’t have AGI.”

A Test of Intelligence

The first ARC-AGI benchmarks were structured as competitions hosted by founder François Chollet. The tests challenged AI models on pattern recognition and reasoning through problems that models hadn’t previously been exposed to.

Around late 2024, AI models powered by LLMs finally began to show promise on these leaderboards, and by the end of 2025, the benchmark was considered “saturated” when models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic managed to score above 90%.

The ARC-AGI-2 leaderboard proved to be somewhat tougher. No model has yet scored a 90% on this test, but the latest OpenAI and Google models are closing in.

So the ARC Prize team said fine. What about puzzle games?

Check out the chart below: The yellow and grey lines represent human performance. Many humans are able to beat all 7 levels of a puzzle game in the ARC-AGI-3 collection called vc33. This is a publicly available game that you can try for yourself. AI models are the green line, the flat one at the bottom. No heartbeat. That means that no general commercial AI model has yet managed to beat even a single level.

Many of the games in the full collection are playable on the ARC website, but most aren’t. Lukas Donkers explains why there’s a veil of secrecy protecting many of the games:

So the total set is 135 games. 25 of those games are public which means you can play them right now. The other 110 are split into private and semi-private.

Here’s how it works:

• Anyone can enter the competition and attempt to create an AI system that is able to play and solve these games. You could train a model on the 25 public games and hope that the learnings transfer to the private set, but they probably won’t: the games are too unique and dissimilar. Instead, you should aim to make a generally intelligent system that is able to solve any game without having seen the game before. This is difficult, and that’s why there’s $2,000,000 in prizes for whoever manages to do that. You can test your system at any time by running it against the public games through the API, which gives you an indication for how it’ll perform during evaluation.

• Then there’s 55 games in the semi-private set. The reason it’s called that is because the API for these games is only exposed to trusted partners; mostly the big AI labs testing their frontier models. There’s a small chance of data leakage when the games are ‘played’ like this, which is why we have the third category.

• Private games are the most closely guarded secret. These determine the ‘final score’ for submissions in the competition, and the games are only played on our servers: you have to submit your code if you want it to be evaluated!

The whole point of all this secrecy is simple: this benchmark tests whether the player, human or AI, is able to complete the game on their first attempt, having never seen the game before. We confirmed with the humans—so AI needs to be held to the same standard. If our private set ever leaked, then AI labs could just train their models on the games. It’s easy to solve a puzzle if you’ve seen it before, and AI is great at memorization. But that’s not what we’re testing here.2

—Lukas Donkers, via email to Push to Talk

I wanted to know more about how the 135 games were created, so I shot a note to the ARC Prize team. The foundation’s president, Gregory Kamradt, was kind enough to hop on a call and answer some of my questions about the new benchmark.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Push to Talk Q&A with Gregory Kamradt

PUSH TO TALK: I’m curious about the journey that led you to build a puzzle game collection for ARC-AGI-3. Why go that route?

GREGORY KAMRADT: The truth of it is that static benchmarks cannot capture interactive intelligence and proper intelligence itself. If you think about humans, reality is interactive. So we can call them video games, but really it’s an environment, and the ultimate environment is reality. So we’re taking a step towards that direction.

And the other reason is you get a lot more axes of freedom to test the different properties of intelligence—like long horizon planning, world modeling, continual updating—all things that you’re just not going to get through static benchmarks. I guess you could think of it as a design decision, but it’s more of an obvious choice. There’s no other way to do it except going towards interactive.

PUSH TO TALK: It’s interesting how existing models just sort of fall apart when they encounter these games. If you put Claude in a coding environment, it can do a lot. But it’s astonishing that the models aren’t able to make more progress. What is your thinking on why they’re performing so low on the benchmark as of now?

GREGORY KAMRADT: I’d say two main reasons: Number one, the current models have been extremely trained specifically for the coding use case. I agree: if you use Claude Code, it’s insane, it’s awesome. But it’s a very scoped and narrow domain that it’s good for. So when it encounters something that’s outside its training data, that it’s unfamiliar with, it’s just not going to do that well. Now the other thing we saw, the early failure modes, is the LLM will think it’s playing another game. So it thinks it’s playing Battleships or, you know, Pac-Man or something, and it’s unable to steer itself away from that. So it holds on hard to its training data.

PUSH TO TALK: Yes. I saw a Google Gemini researcher who tweeted that she was looking at the thinking log of Gemini as it played ARC-AGI-3 and it was like, “I think this is ACTIVISION TENNIS.”

GREGORY KAMRADT: Yes, so there’s that. And then the second piece is, we are an AGI benchmark, and we reflect that belief in the way that we test these models. We are not putting any special human intelligence into a harness and giving it any extra help, because our goal is not to maximize the performance of the model right now. Our goal is to be the most accurate reflection of when model intelligence increases. It’s our belief that as the model gets smarter, you need less and less of a harness. And if you take that to the limit, AGI is not going to need a harness at all. So we take a very hands-off approach. No training wheels.

PUSH TO TALK: I’m glad you brought this up because this is the area where I’ve seen you get some pushback. I’m a bit out of my depth on this, but my understanding of the pushback on the harness question is that it goes something like: Well, aren’t the models already, increasingly complicated systems involving selectors and different tools built in? What’s your response to that?

GREGORY KAMRADT: Yeah, totally. We had to draw the line somewhere, and where we’re drawing it right now is what is behind the API versus what is in front of the API. In front of the API means, like, if a human does a really good system prompt and inserts a lot of human intelligence on how to play the game. We decided we’re not interested in verifying or highlighting human intelligence baked into the prompt. However, if it’s behind the API, then we can assert that it is at least general enough to serve a wide variety of use cases. At what point is it general enough that you can claim it’s general? If OpenAI puts it behind their API that is publicly available and not targeting us explicitly. That’s where we’re drawing the line.

PUSH TO TALK: And so specifically, when you say “behind the API,” it can’t just be that they give you an API key for their fine-tuned-specifically-for-ARC-AGI-3 model, right?

GREGORY KAMRADT: Exactly. That’d be no good, right? No, the spirit of this is to test publicly available models that are commercially available, because requiring it to be commercially available puts pressure on making sure that it’s actually general. And we always ask model providers, “Hey, have you explicitly trained on ARC? If so, how?” So at least we can be transparent with what they tell us.

PUSH TO TALK: I’d like to ask a little bit about the background of the games. I read that you basically had to form a game studio to make all the games.

GREGORY KAMRADT: Yep. We needed eleven game developers we had to hire in-house to get it done.

PUSH TO TALK: I’d love to hear more about how that came together.

GREGORY KAMRADT: Yeah. Long story short, we started off with a very small team—a lead game designer and one engineer—and we started off in Unity to build these games. And the process was just so slow. These are pixel-based games, they’re not complicated, we didn’t need Unity. So we quickly pivoted over to Python—our own Python game engine.

I don’t come from a game dev background, so this was all new for me, but then all of a sudden I’m recruiting game engineers on contract to get this done. What is under-talked-about, which we didn’t highlight in the paper that much and we don’t talk about a lot publicly, is the amount of operations behind making these games… it was a lot more than I was expecting. And when I say operations, I mean hiring the developers, interviewing them, incentivizing them—we had to move to variable-based comp halfway through—developing the pipeline, doing the QA, doing the verification, motivating them, firing the ones that didn’t work out.

To summarize, we basically had to make a pipeline with four stages for a game to get through. We talk about all this in the paper, but the first stage was the spec: just a half-page markdown file that said, what’s the game idea you want to make? And then everybody on the team could go critique it and comment on it. Then we had internal development, which is basically you built it and you want people to play it internally. Then we had a stage called external, which is when we give it to human testers: people who’ve never seen the game beforehand. If they can’t beat it, it’s too hard and we’ve got to rework it. If they can, it moves on to “done.”

PUSH TO TALK: Is there anything about the response to ARC-AGI-3 that has surprised you so far?

GREGORY KAMRADT: It’s been about half and half—maybe sixty percent favorable, forty percent negative. The favorable part is cool because people buy into the hardest decision we had to make, which was going very minimal. They buy into it and they’re advocating on our behalf, which is great because that’s how you know the messaging is working. It’s not us needing to enter the arena, it’s other people helping.

And then other people have bought in and said, “I’ve had a feeling that we don’t have AGI, other people are claiming we do, and I’m glad that ARC Prize shows us that no, we still don’t have AGI.” What I love about ARC is that we make a falsifiable claim: because humans can do these problems and AI cannot, we don’t have AGI. That’s the falsifiable claim. And one day that won’t be true anymore. One day you’re going to have AI that can do anything a human can, and at that point it’s basically AGI.

On the other side: you’re always going to have a couple haters here and there, but if you look at their backgrounds, I find it’s rare that somebody serious is critical. It’s usually somebody that’s armchair quarterbacking and hasn’t contributed to open science or really contributed to anything. So I don’t worry about it too much.

One more meta thing is, regardless of whether the benchmark actually ends up doing its job the way we want it to, the fact that we’re pushing efficiency as a first-class citizen, both from an algorithmic perspective and from a cost perspective. I’m really happy with the job we’re doing there.

PUSH TO TALK: I love that. Thanks for letting me take some of your time.

GREGORY KAMRADT: Awesome.

That’s all for now. Thanks to Greg Kamradt and Lukas Donkers for speaking with me about their work.

Factorio is a cult hit, a perennial seller, one of those games that at least one person you know is seemingly always playing.

The game is about building factories. Or, really, you grow them, slapping down component parts like conveyor belts, mining equipment, and other simple machines. The parts slowly compound and your machine evolves gradually into a massive resource extraction system that spans first acres, then square miles.

The complexity that emerges from this straightforward premise is dizzying. Observing a skilled Factorio player at work feels less like watching a videogame and more like taking on the perspective of God, serenely overseeing humanity’s industrial terraformation of the earth.

And indeed, the ultimate goal in Factorio is to proceed through several industrial revolutions of your own creation, ultimately gathering enough resources and building enough manufacturing capacity to construct a rocket powerful enough to leave the planet behind and usher the player-character into the space age.

Factorio has always been a favorite of engineering types: the type of person who might otherwise tinker with a model train set, or an elaborate excel model, or a python script. Nerds, is what I’m saying.

More recently, though, I’ve been noticing more and more references to Factorio coming from a very specific subset of engineering types: software engineers who are obsessed with AI-powered coding systems like Claude Code. The specific claim I keep seeing thrown around is that Factorio works as a sort of bicycle for the mind to prepare people for using AI agents more effectively. Learn to play Factorio, learn to harness the tools of the future—so it’s said, anyway.

It struck me that Factorio is probably the one game that most seriously explores the concept of automation. The question of how to automate one’s own labor is the central challenge posed by the game, and so I wondered what its creators might think about the viral claims going around that Factorio itself is useful as a tool for training people to use real-world automation tools.

Luckily, Michal Kovařík, Founder and Company Director at Factorio developer Wube Software, was kind enough to respond to my questions over email.

Kovařík and the rest of the Wube team are based in Prague, in the Czech Republic. What follows is our exchange, with very minor edits for formatting.

PUSH TO TALK: One of the biggest questions facing humanity in the 21st century is the role of automation. What ought we hand over to the machines, and what work should we save for ourselves? What's your view on this? And does Factorio shed light on this question?

Michal Kovařík: Well, it certainly shows that, in principle, automation is nearly limitless leverage of human work, which is mostly visible with one human and endless factories. Factorio is the optimistic fantasy, that the human is always in control till the end. There was always some kind of idea that the player would automate even simple tasks, like expanding mines etc, which would be done by some kind of "AI assistant" which would eventually escalate into the factory rejecting the player as being not needed anymore. But it sounds too grim honestly.

More recently I've seen people arguing that Factorio is a good way to train computer engineers in using AI agents. What do you make of this? Are you yourself Claude Coding?

I had my first experience with AI help for coding two months back, when I was doing a small side project in technologies which aren't my main focus (web stuff). I've learned that for that case, AI is a great help to answer questions like: "how to write this function this and this way,” or "how to write this weird sql command I need," or: "rewrite this forloop using a lambda, I know there is something in this language," etc.

But I don't really have much experience with AI being used to actually generate code in bigger chunks than small snippets of code that I just put together. The little experience I had with it was enough to not let it anywhere near this task for now.

It might be certainly fun to see how the agents are improving etc. Somehow, I believe that the easiest way to train AI these days is to get a physical robot, and train it on simple tasks in the real world.

One could easily imagine Factorio with other input methods or control schemes—RTS style command of many small units for construction or even a Sim City style Godlike view of the world. What led your team to settle on a single controllable human entity as the default interface layer for factories in Factorio? Building on this, given the remote view tools and automation abilities you unlock as the game progresses, it almost feels like the game unlocks RTS-style control as a reward for mastering its available tools... would you agree with that characterization?

Having character instead of god view helps with few things.

1. It makes it more personal, where your avatar is right there. It also means you are personally reachable and can fight.

2. It makes the progression into automated construction robots, spidertrons and general shift of god view controlling more rewarding compared to having it basically from start. And progression is very important in my game design philosophy.

In the base version of Factorio, achieving space travel is the ultimate goal for the player. And then the Space Age expansion treats reaching the edge of the solar system as the end goal. What does the dream of space travel mean to you?

When I get asked what is my wish, I say I would like to live 4 billion years. For many reasons, but one of them would be to have a chance to witness humanity reach the stars.

Are there aspects of the real world that you wish worked more like they do in Factorio?

The main character didn't have to pay subscription for his stuff to continue working. He actually owned these.

Interesting Links from January

A few things that grabbed my attention this month:

• Moby-Dick Discord Edition - I have Claude Code on the brain, obviously, and used it to create a Discord bot that published the entire text of Moby-Dick as a Discord server. Each chapter is a channel, and each paragraph is a message. About 160 people have since joined the server and are spamming emoji reactions on their favorite parts of the book. This is, I’m sure we can all agree, what Herman Melville would have wanted.

• Genie 3 - I think world models are among the strangest and potentially most interesting nascent technologies of the moment. Google DeepMind’s new public release of Genie 3 suggests the tech is advancing faster than expected.

• Some hope for independent games media - There are signs that the paid subscription model is working for a small but growing set of writers and creatives who cover games. Stephen Totilo’s very transparent breakdown of the revenue growth for Game File is one encouraging signal. The successful launch of Mothership—a women-focused publication from former Polygon editors Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah—is another win for a segment of media that has had precious few Ws in recent years.

• Disease prediction based on sleep patterns - Another AI breakthrough: A paper in Nature found that over 130 diseases can be predicted via data gathered over the course of just one night of sleep. Per the report: “the model showed strong predictive performance for several cancers: prostate cancer… breast cancer… and melanomas of skin.”

• Movie Recommendation: Train Dreams - There’s a huge amount of buzz around this movie, which earned at Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. I physically couldn’t speak for about five minutes after the film ended. You can watch it on Netflix.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back with another roundup next month.

But before jumping in: Push to Talk started out as a newsletter about the games industry, and the only story that mattered for anyone in gaming this week was the news of the sudden passing of Vince Zampella. I wrote something on X about Vince’s unparalleled career and the impact he had. Very few people working in any creative medium have changed their industry the way Vince changed gaming.

More importantly, he was a good person and a respected leader in an industry where real leadership is rare. I worked for Vince only briefly when I was comms director as Respawn, and we swapped messages occasionally in the years since I left. Others knew him better than me. But I had plenty of opportunities to witness firsthand how he inspired the people around him. It’s no wonder so many talented game devs followed him for years, even leaving jobs to keep working for him. He will be missed.

X Axis, Y Axis

Some interesting charts about signs of an unexpected games industry revenue surge, datacenter power demand, and some data on global electricity generation.

1. Global games revenue was up significantly. Newzoo’s end-of-year report showed that global spending on games rose by 7.5% year-over-year. Console was mostly buoyed by the launch of the Switch 2. PC is going nuts.

2. No new free-to-play releases cracked the top 10 on PC. Also from the above-linked Newzoo report: Premium priced titles dominated among new releases on PC this year. EA led the pack with Battlefield 6, followed immediately by “Tyler,” the anonymous solo developer behind Schedule I. Video Game Insights estimates that the Early Access game has grossed over $122 million. New-release F2P games may be cooked, but indies aren’t.

3. AI datacenters are power-hungry monsters. I thought the below chart from the a16z newsletter was helpful for visualizing the scale of the AI datacenter buildout. Datacenters in the US are projected to consume 391 TWh annually by 2035. That would be nearly 10% of the US’s current annual energy usage, which is an estimated 4,100 TWh for 2025.

4. But renewables are surging to meet demand. Canary Media has a lot of good reporting on the status of the global renewables buildout, which is being led by China’s near-unbelievable buildout of solar and battery capacity. 498 TWh of additional solar energy was generated just in the first three quarters of this year compared to the same period last year. Together with wind (+137 TWh) and a little help from nuclear, it’s more than enough to cover total new energy demand.

5. The US energy grid is going solarpunk. Over 80% of all new utility-scale capacity additions to the US energy grid this year came from solar and batteries. Most of the rest came from wind. About 25% of utility-scale energy generation in the US now comes from renewables.

AI x Gaming in the News

Most discussion of AI in games contends with the never-ending controversies around its usage (see the controversy around Expedition 33). But some deeper changes are underway. Here are three trends that I think will actually move the conversation forward next year.

6. New AI models are becoming exponentially more reliable. This one’s causing a ruckus with my software engineering friends. There are a million goofy ways people are trying to measure AI progress. One of the more interesting evaluations is METR’s “task length” test. It’s been well-observed that the longer an AI works on an assigned problem, the more likely it is to screw something up. But the leading models have been getting consistently better. The length of time that new models can work while still delivering the desired result (at least half the time, by METR’s measure) has been doubling every four months or so. Anthropic’s latest release, Claude Opus 4.5, even beat that recent trend.

7. NVIDIA is attempting to build an AI agent that can play any game. It’s probably not obvious at first, but this is actually a robotics R&D play. The idea behind the new NitroGen foundation model is that if you can train an AI agent that can navigate the various rulesets and physics paradigms of thousands of different games, you could drop that elite gamer AI into a real-world robot body and have it perform actual physical tasks.

8. World models raise all the money. Back in August I wrote about Google’s big breakthrough with its Genie 3 world model, which offers (I’m oversimplifying here) a way to generate interactive video without the use of an underlying game engine. Since then multiple competing world model startups have appeared and are raising truly wild amounts of capital: a $134m seed round for General Intuition, an in-the-works $586m round for Yann LeCun’s new world model startup, and a rumored fast-follow Series A of “several hundred million dollars” for General Intuition again. Reading between the lines in these announcements, it seems leading AI researchers and investors think that world model tech will be useful for AI training purposes.

Recommendations

Some great Substack pieces, a Finnish action flick, and an ASCII art game

9. GOOD READS: Donald Boat’s review of a 1971 “anti-Western.” The 22-year-old Donald Boat is mostly known for tweeting things like this:

But he is also a genius writer—easily one of the best on Substack. I loved his recent review of the “anti-Western” film McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

donald boat

REVIEW: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

In the end, we can never say we weren’t warned, for John “Pudgy” McCabe tried to warn us, warn us with shag of hair, stink of garb, plop of egg, plonk of bootstep, whisk of felt, slouch of voice, the sleight of his hands and the song strumming out the belly of his horse that he told us, he told us when he came he was a stranger…

Read more

5 months ago · 23 likes · 1 comment · donald boat

10. GOOD READS: Clare Coffey’s beautiful defense of a misunderstood character in the 1946 Christmas classic film It's a Wonderful Life. This piece is actually a few years old, but ‘tis the season.

The Bulwark

There Is No Mary Problem in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’

DESPITE ITS SINKING INTO INSIGNIFICANCE upon initial release, the eventual ascendency of It’s a Wonderful Life was always almost inevitable. For one thing, it stars Jimmy Stewart. For another, like all the greatest Christmas literature, it has an undercurrent of darkness to it. Like…

Read more

3 years ago · 1086 likes · Clare Coffey

11. GOOD READS: Aled Maclean-Jones’s take on recent Tom Cruise movies. This is one of the most well-argued cases for a “hidden meaning” in a popular film I’ve ever read.

The Metropolitan Review

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the f…

Read more

5 months ago · 1325 likes · 75 comments · Aled Maclean-Jones and The Metropolitan Review

12. GOOD WATCH: Sisu (2023). It’s an over-the-top action movie about a Finnish gold miner who fights Nazis. If you’re into that kind of thing, just watch it. The wife and I discovered it just a few days ago and are excited to watch the sequel.

13. GOOD PLAY: Effulgence RPG (2025). Click through on the below tweet and check out the 3D ASCII art style this guy cooked up. Unbelievable visuals.

14. My prediction for 2026. My coworkers talked me into filming one of these “Big Ideas for 2026” videos. I make the case that the coming tide of slop is going to raise demand—and thus comp—for the best writers:

Please feel welcome to reply to this email with feedback. I hope you all have a merry Christmas and a restful holiday.

So often, it’s the smallest creative choices we make that end up having the biggest impact.

One example: Grant Kirkhope was never supposed to be the voice actor for one of the most iconic characters in gaming. But in 1998, a casual choice landed him the role. Kirkhope had joined the Donkey Kong 64 team at Rare. Fresh off the acclaimed soundtracks for other Rare games like GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie, Kirkhope had been tapped to compose the soundtrack for the iconic gorilla’s first 3D adventure.

Previous DK games had featured basic grunts and hooting sounds for the characters, but DK64 would be the first to feature actual spoken dialogue. But who would do the voice acting?

“I asked people at Rare—does anybody want to voice a character?—and no one wanted to do it,” Kirkhope told Push to Talk, “and I got so sick of asking, I said, I’ll just do it myself, and bollocks to it.”

There wasn’t much to the job—quotes include Okay, Hey, Cool, and Ohhhhh Banana—but Kirkhope’s delivery for these simple lines must have resonated with the team at Nintendo. They went on to re-use his recorded samples in over a dozen games over the following decade, including Donkey Konga, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series.

“Nintendo owned half of Rare,” Kirkhope explained. “So when they asked for the samples, of course I sent them. But I never thought they’d really use it.”

Thus thanks to a moment’s decision, Kirkhope became—for over a decade—the de-facto voice of Donkey Kong, one of the only characters in the history of the games industry to remain relevant through both the arcade and modern console eras.

From N64 to the Big Screen

Other small choices made by the Donkey Kong 64 team have resonated far beyond what anyone could have expected. Perhaps none moreso than the decision by the Rare team to include an over-the-top rap music video that played every time players booted up the game.

The “DK Rap” was composed by Kirkhope and written and performed by Rare designer George Andreas, and was intended essentially as a joke. At the time, it struck many critics as a bizarre and ridiculous inclusion in the game, but the song grew a cult fandom, and over time came to be perceived as almost synonymous with the character of Donkey Kong.

With the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, the song’s association with the character was canonized. The DK Rap plays as Donkey Kong’s entrance theme when the character first appears on screen. (Kirkhope says he’s heard that Seth Rogen, who voiced DK in the film, is at least partly responsible for the song’s inclusion.)

Kirkhope was as astonished as anyone when he learned that the song would appear in the film, and that it uses the original recorded sample. “They just took it out of the game and looped it, they didn’t re-record it,” he says. “So in the movie that’s the Banjo team going ‘DK, Donkey Kong.’ A bunch of guys in a crappy little booth in Rare. And they just took it out of the game and put it in the movie.”

Why Kirkhope Still Hasn’t Watched The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Kirkhope went viral in 2023 when he commented publicly about his disappointment that his name wouldn’t appear in the credits for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite the film’s inclusion of the DK Rap.

I decided to ask him about it:

PUSH TO TALK: I remember seeing your reaction to the DK rap in The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the fact they didn’t credit you on it. Did that ever come to a happier conclusion?

GRANT KIRKHOPE: So I did contact them about it. When I did the Super Smash Bros. thing,1 I dealt with them directly. So I had this guy who was my main contact. So I said to him, could you do a bit of digging just under the radar to find out why didn’t they credit me?” And he says, ‘oh yeah, I think you’re going to get an official response.’

So I got a response back from, I guess, one of the legal people. And it said, basically, they came up with this three rule criteria, which was they decided that for any music owned by Nintendo that appeared in the movie, they wouldn’t credit the composer apart from Koji Kondo. Then they decided that anything with a vocal, they would credit the composer. So the Donkey Kong rap score’s there. But then they also decided if Nintendo also owned that, they wouldn’t credit the composer.

So it was sort of this arbitrary thing. And I said, you know… by the time the song credits roll in the movie, it’s right at the very end of the credits, and the theater’s entirely empty. There’s only me and my wife and my kids sat there going, look what I did. You know, for a second, a bit of text, what’s it matter?

Right. It sounds like some of these decisions are being made by the legal department versus the creatives, in any case.

Oh, yeah. Even like having mine and Dave’s musics in Donkey Kong: Bananza, right? We didn’t know until people said hey, guess what, your music’s in there. When Microsoft bought Rare the deal was that all the IP that Rare had created went to Microsoft, but Donkey Kong in its entirety went back to Nintendo. So that was the deal. So they got DK64 back and everything that was in there.

Oh, so to some extent, Microsoft’s purchase of Rare really clarified the rights issue for all that music. It’s just Nintendo’s.

Yeah.

It makes sense, though it must still feel weird for you. At the same time, that scene in the movie when the DK Rap plays is a big celebratory, joyful kind of moment, right?

I tell you what, I still haven’t watched the movie yet. I’ve seen that bit with the rap. But I was so pissed I haven’t watched it.

Chance Encounters

In some ways, most of Kirkhope’s career as a game composer has hinged upon small, chance moments like these. For over a decade before his first games industry job, he was a working musician, playing as many as five nights per week and touring as a trumpet player with bands like Zoot and the Roots and Little Angels. “We ended up doing gigantic tours,” he says, “six weeks with Bon Jovi, six weeks with Van Halen, ZZ Top, Brad Adams. We were playing 90,000 seat arenas outdoors in Europe. It was just that absolute massive rock and roll thing.” That lasted for a few years, he says, “but of course, as it always does with these bands, it all comes to an end and everybody falls out and goes a separate way. So I was like back to playing pub rock in North Yorkshire for £35 a night, you know, playing covers and all that, thinking this is it.”

It was while working pub gigs that Kirkhope’s friend, Robin Beanland, told him about a job he’d gotten doing music for video games at a company called Rare. Beanland recommended some equipment to play around with—”a copy of Cubase, a computer, an Atari ST with a meg of RAM… a meg was a big deal”—and Kirkhope decided to give it a shot. “I sent five cassette tapes off to Rare over the course of 1994,” he says. “For the longest time I never got a reply, but then out of the blue got a letter saying, please come and interview.”

The interviewer was David Wise, the composer behind the acclaimed Donkey Kong Country series. Kirkhope got the gig and has been working primarily on game soundtracks ever since. Kirkhope’s career can be split fairly evenly between the Rare days (1995–2008) and the years since he moved to the United States in 2008 to work on the soundtrack for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Given Kirkhope’s reputation—he is easily one of the most recognizable video game composers outside of Japan—work has been coming steadily. In recent years Kirkhope has landed composer credits on iconic series like Civilization, World of Warcraft, Street Fighter, and Minecraft: Dungeons.

“I feel like I’m in a sweet spot where people that have played the Rare games from the 64-ear are now 30-somethings,” he says. “And they’re all working in games companies, and they go, ‘oh, I remember Grant Kirkhope, let’s hire him. Get that old bloke, he can come and do it.’ So I ended up working on tons of stuff that was unexpected.”

And despite Kirkhope’s mixed feelings about the credits kerfuffle in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, he speaks with pride about the work he still gets to do with Nintendo. Referencing the two Mario + Rabbids games he composed, he says “If you told me in 1995 that I’d get to work on two Mario games, I’d have said you were out of your mind.”

Most striking about Kirkhope’s story is how it demonstrates the impossible-to-calculate upside of diligently making lots of creative work over the course of many years. Everything an artist produces has nearly limitless generative potential that manifests in ways we can’t possibly predict. A chance referral from a musician friend leads to a job on some of the greatest games of the 90s, a rap song written as a joke becomes the de-facto theme for one of the most iconic characters ever, and the pause music for a movie-tie-in video game inspires a hit hip hop song decades later.

None of these events follow necessarily from their precedents. But the compounding magic of thousands of small creative choices gradually led to all of these unexpected outcomes, including Kirkhope’s status as one of the most celebrated game composers working today. Even the smallest creative choices can be life-changing.

Next year will mark 30 years since Kirkhope’s first credited game soundtrack. So I asked him: How long does you plan to keep on going?

“Forever,” he says. “I’m gonna be writing the last note as they put the lid on my coffin.”

That’s it for this week, and for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading Push to Talk. I’ve loved writing it for you.

I started writing this newsletter almost two years ago because I felt I had a lot of things to say about video games. After spending a decade working on games like League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Omega Strikers, I was overflowing with thoughts about the “interactive entertainment” industry as both a commercial enterprise and an artistic medium.

Exactly 90 weekly editions later, I’ve said just about everything that was on my mind. Push to Talk’s archives include 28 essays sharing everything I know about games marketing and communications, along with 51 reported stories featuring interviews with people doing incredible work in and around games.

My belief going into this project was that games are set to become the preeminent artform of the 21st century. After having these conversations, I’ve updated that opinion: They already are.

Writing this newsletter has opened some very unexpected doors. Before it was bought and gutted, my favorite games culture website Polygon.com approached to ask if they could syndicate Push to Talk’s editorial features. Then, the world’s largest venture capital firm asked if I’d consider helping them with their own newsletter, which later led to a full time job that’s turned out to be more rewarding than I could’ve imagined.

Most surprising, though, has been how much I look forward to the reactions from regular readers. Starting this newsletter has been one of the most fulfilling choices I’ve ever made, in no small part because of the messages sent in every week from the regulars. The emails and Discord DMs from old friends, the texts from former coworkers. You all know who you are. I genuinely love each of you.

Next week I’ll publish the last weekly edition of Push to Talk, featuring an interview with a person I think most exemplifies the beauty of games as a medium for expression.

Grant Kirkhope composed the soundtrack to my childhood. He’s behind the music for games like Goldeneye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark, Star Fox Adventures, Viva Piñata, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and the Mario + Rabbids series. Kirkhope’s music is so instantly recognizable and infectious that decades into his career, TikTokers who make references to his earliest work are still raking in views by the millions:

I would make the case for Kirkhope as one of the five greatest ever composers for games. And most people don’t realize that Kirkhope was also, for over a decade, the de-facto voice actor behind Donkey Kong, a character that was present for the birth of the commercial video game industry and who remains relevant today.

After next week’s Kirkhope profile, I’ll keep Push to Talk going on an irregular cadence. You can still expect occasional interviews and essays, though whether that’ll be monthly or bi-monthly or even less regular than that isn’t yet decided. I’ve liked having an excuse to reach out and talk to amazing people working in gaming. So if you’ve enjoyed Push to Talk and want to see more, stay on the list.

I do also have one other thing in the works: a project I’m cooking up with my longtime friend , the mastermind behind the luxury book publisher Tune & Fairweather. We’re making something tangible, beautiful, and heavy. Readers of Push to Talk will probably like this new thing. It involves that strange, toga-wearing birdman up at the top of this article.

To all the readers, thank you. See you next week.

I’ve been traveling a lot for work, and my go-to airplane game of late has been Fields of Mistria, a sort of fantasy-inspired take on Stardew Valley which itself was inspired by a whole lineage of farming games that came before it.

If you read the 17,000 “overwhelmingly positive” English reviews for Mistria on Steam, one thing jumps out: everyone intuitively understand that this game exists explicitly in relation to Stardew Valley. Reviewers praise it for fixing the Stardew’s problems, as if it were a patch for the game rather than a standalone artistic work.

Even Mistria’s creative distinctions—reviewers often praise the writing and characters—are complimented specifically in reference to those same elements in Stardew.

The other big difference, according to Steam reviewers, is that Mistria’s villagers are hot.

I’ve been thinking about the ways game genres evolve—about the tendency for beloved works to spawn branches bearing new fruit. It reminds me of this beautiful language family map (see up top) made by the Finnish graphic artist Minna Sundberg, which illustrates all the unexpected connections between various Indo-European languages.

You could probably draw a similar tree-like visualization to explain the history of many evolving fields of production, whether cars, recipes, or paintings. I don’t know if the metaphor holds for all art forms, but the image of a tree works particularly well when tracing the evolution of certain game genres, especially the “cozy farming simulator.”

Roots

In soil fertilized with ideas from PC classics like Little Computer People (1985) and SimFarm (1993), the base of the cozy farming sim tree is undeniably Harvest Moon (1996), a Super Nintendo game that went on to produce over 30 sequels and spin-offs—and which despite some licensing rights shenanigans continue to release today as entries in the Story of Seasons series.

From this trunk, countless fecund branches have sprouted, some you might call “cozy” (Animal Crossing, Palia) and some decidedly more gritty and capitalistic (FarmVille, Grow A Garden). But the biggest and most abundant branch of the tree is without question Stardew Valley (2016), originally created by Eric Barone. As of December of last year, it has sold over 41 million copies1 across all platforms, making it one of the best-selling independent games ever made.

Trunk

Barone’s story is by now well-known, and he was always forthright about his inspirations. “My whole reason for making Stardew Valley was to eventually add all the things that I wished Harvest Moon did,” Barone wrote in a Reddit thread posted in 2012, years before the game released.

The language used here is interesting. He wasn’t making something merely “like” Harvest Moon; his vision was to preserve that game’s core while adding more, modifying the base and extending it in new directions. Over the years people have used different words to describe the relationship between Stardew and Harvest Moon. Is it an homage? A spiritual successor? Some cynics have even used the word clone. I’d argue that none of these capture the real nature of the relationship between the two games, which is more like familial descent. As an approach to artistic creation, there is something like the mindset of a modder here.

Branches

There are many reasons to mod a game. You might be “fixing” something annoying or problematic with its design, or adding components that feel missing, or customizing the experience in ways desired only by you. The modder respects the original vision of the artist, while imagining that the addition of their own creative touch might result in something even better.

And so of course, even after Barone delivered on his vision of a game with “all the things he wished Harvest Moon did,” others imagined even more ways to add on. The most popular mod for Stardew Valley is called Stardew Valley Extended, which adds new characters, areas, items, among countless other tweaks to the game’s design. It has been downloaded over 20 million times on Nexus Mods.

At some point Extended’s creator, FlashShifter, had his car stolen and, in a fit of desperation, reached out to Barone and asked if he’d be willing to pay him for work.2 Barone hired him, and Flash wound up becoming an actual developer on Stardew Valley itself. He even contributed meaningfully to the game’s massively popular 1.6 update—a rare example of a trunk re-absorbing one of its branches.

Fruit

In professional games studios, concept artists often leverage direct references to other works—especially via mood boards—when creating new characters or worlds. I’ve heard it said more than once, by artists working in these roles, that the mark of good work is in how well one “hides your references.” This always struck me as funny, as if the artist is a furtive little trickster using misdirection to sneak their inspirations under the audience’s nose.

That’s one way of making things, I suppose. But maybe equally as valid is an approach where the creator hides nothing, showing all their references right out in the open, while managing to produce something new and beautiful all the same.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go see if my wife needs any help in the garden.

Last week's article about those turbo-viral Minecraft Civilization videos was unusually popular. If you'll indulge me, there's a leftover rabbit hole connected to that piece that I'd like to explore.

It starts with a comment by Ish, the director of those videos, which surprised me. I had mentioned that I first heard about his video because of a tweet from the communications director on Palworld. And when I asked Ish about that game, he said "uhh.. I've heard of it."

Mind you, Palworld was the biggest breakout hit PC game last year, selling something like 17 million copies on Steam alone, so I was kind of surprised by this answer. How could he not know about Palworld? Later in the call I brought it up again, and asked whether he’d consider himself a “gamer.” He hesitated. "I play one game other than Minecraft for fun," he said, "And that's Clash of Clans. I log on like once a day. That's my one consistent game."

Ish went on to add that occasionally he plays multiplayer games like Peak and Phasmophobia—the sorts of games that are quick and easy to drop into with friends. Our conversation moved on, back to Minecraft.

If I tell you I know a guy who's 23 years old and who earns his living making videos about Minecraft, you would probably say: that's a gamer. But like… if that guy only plays two games… is he? I wonder if the term "gamer," with all the stench of Cheetos dust and shame it has accrued over the years, will be a term that anyone—particularly younger generations—continue to use to describe themselves in years going forward.

The idea of a gamer as a descriptive identity category was first embraced by video game magazines back in the 80s, themselves poaching a term from the tabletop wargaming community. By the 90s and 2000s, the term had crept into advertisements and mass media. After the cultural firestorm of Gamergate in the 2010s, there was a brief and tortured attempt by large tech and media companies to rehabilitate the term and make it more inclusive with advertising campaigns declaring “We’re all gamers.”

This led some to embrace the term ironically, defanging its many ridiculous connotations with a smirk and a half-cocked eyebrow. Watch how these Counter-Strike tournament casters react to an overwrought Intel advertisement about gaming inclusivity:

Maybe gamer has simply aged out of usefulness, soured by associations accrued over time. But there’s also data to suggest that players’ habits are shifting away from omnivorous consumption. Earlier this year Newzoo put out some data showing that the number of games played per year is dropping across basically every platform.

On Xbox and Steam in particular, the proportion of players who only play 1-3 games per year has been growing, while the share of those who play more than 11 games per year has been consistently shrinking. One obvious explanation for this is a phenomenon I covered here last year: old games are killing new games.

That is, people are mostly playing games released in last decade:

The data's helpful, but in this case I honestly think the anecdotal evidence might be more relevant. Don't we all already know that most people only play a few games per year? I know two different guys who literally only play Final Fantasy XIV. Think about how incredibly specific that is. There are millions more like them.

And let's not forget the normies: the people who'll spend $500 on a PS5, and another $80 on the new Grand Theft Auto or FIFA or Call of Duty, but who would otherwise never self-identify as gamers. The same goes for the next generation of kids who play Roblox and Minecraft and nothing else. Calling these people "gamers" is like calling a diehard season ticket holder for the Cleveland Browns a "sports fan." Sure, it’s technically accurate, but such a person has nothing in common with a tennis buff, or a hockey guy. The terminology is not specific enough to function as a meaningful descriptor, and it implies familial or spiritual bonds with others that don’t actually exist.

There will always be many people who play lots of games, people who are interested in games as a category. I count myself among this group. I probably play 25 games per year, mostly indie PC games (especially on flights when I pack my Steam Deck) and Nintendo Switch games during game nights with my kids.

But even I—a guy who writes a weekly newsletter about video games—am hesitant to make my gaming habits part of my identity with a label like "gamer." My wife and I probably watch 25 movies per year on streaming services, but are we "moviers?" Not really. It's not important on the level of our identities. And besides—everybody watches movies. Increasingly, the same can be said for games.

In the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle, the author introduces the idea of a granfalloon: a sort of a false grouping of unrelated people, "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done." In the book, two characters discover that they're both Hoosiers—people from Indiana. One declares that she and her husband have "been around the world twice, and everywhere we go we found Hoosiers in charge of everything." She lists out a bunch of important Hoosiers: a hotel manager, an editor of Life magazine, an Ambassador to Yugoslavia. And the gag, of course, is that none of these people owe any of their supposed success to their origins in Indiana. This woman's worldview has become bizarrely warped by a word, a slice of conceptual space describing a shared identity that in reality has no explanatory power for the state of the world.

If I could make a prediction, it would be that the term "gamer" will slowly fade away, clung to by only a small minority of the generation that grew on the forums and subreddits that served as focal points for 2000s and 2010s gaming culture. The next wave of players are so native to games that they see nothing particularly special about their own engagement with the medium. They are fish, and games are in the water. Partaking in games no longer merits some special act of identification.

But people are always and everywhere desperate for words, tools, and symbols by which they can define themselves. When an old label loses its usefulness, that’s when the search for new, more specific identities begins.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go play the 5th re-release of Final Fantasy Tactics.

It was November of 2023 when Ish, a 23-year-old native of Illinois, announced a new entry in his "Minecraft Civilization" event series.

Over 8,000 of his fans rushed to apply to join. The prize: the chance to become one of 1,000 players invited to "simulate a realistic civilization" on one of two Minecraft islands hosted by Ish and his team across a more than weeklong event.

Being accepted to join one of Ish's events brought the opportunity for not just fun, but real fame: earlier videos in the series had earned upwards of 10 million, 20 million, and even 38 million views on Ish's YouTube channel.

These videos, often presented as "experiments," defy typical YouTube video genre conventions. They're not scripted beyond the initial scenario devised by Ish, nor are they truly "real" simulations of a digital civilization, because players that get invited to join the events are often self consciously roleplaying, yucking it up either as fictional characters or as heightened versions of themselves. The end result for viewers—after many months of edits from Ish's team—is a carefully crafted episode of something like a reality TV episode, all filmed within Minecraft.

Ish and his team spent nearly two years editing and polishing the video about the event, which was finally published in July. So far over 19 million people have watched the two-and-half hour feature film chronicling what went down on Ish’s two islands. Many are calling it “peak cinema” and one of the best YouTube videos in the history of the platform.

But is “a two hour Minecraft video” really the right way to describe something like this? Is it really just another YouTube video about Minecraft?

"People have used a lot of labels to describe what I do," Ish told me on a call last week. "Experiment, reality show, role play. Personally, I don't have one that I always go to. It's a combination of a bunch of things. Maybe there's not one word that describes it exactly. It's its own beast at this point."

What about, I offered, "Massively Multiplayer Reality TV?"

He laughed. "That's not a bad way to put it."

The Repeat Rule and "Main Character" Energy

One of the most interesting recurring elements in Ish's videos is the way that "main characters" emerge from the anonymous mass of players who join the events. Since none of the players who participate in Ish's videos are directed to play any specific role, they instead sort themselves out into any number of archetypes: including leaders, followers, and soldiers. Many players get more creative, deciding to roleplay as pirates, druglords, or as, say, queen of a Barbie-themed island.

Over the course of Ish's multiday events, he flies around the island, capturing footage from his own first-person perspective as events unfold. As he goes, he takes note of interactions between players and tries to identify interesting storylines—these form the raw material for what ultimately became a finished video on his YouTube channel.

"In comparison to standard reality TV, I tend to be a little bit more hands off," Ish says. "Typically I allow people to form their own nations, form their own conflicts, conduct whatever master plan they want to conduct."

However, there are a few rules that players must follow. One of the most important, necessary for keeping the events from devolving into wanton chaos, is the no "random PVP" rule, which discourages players from attacking each other without some good, narratively-justified reason.

Another dictate, added recently, is the "no repeat" rule, which basically says that any player who has been featured as a "main character" in one of Ish's previous videos should try, to the best of their ability, to avoid becoming a main character in the new one. They shouldn't attempt to lead nations or devise plots that would massively impact the event’s storyline as it emerges naturally over the course of the "experiment."

It's for this reason that a player known as Saparata decided to try to keep a low profile when he was invited to participate in Ish's latest video. He'd acted as the leader of a major nation in Ish's previous "1,000 player" event, binding him under the repeat rule.

"Since this was the first time the repeat rule was implemented," Saparata told me, "I worked hard to respect it by staying independent and avoiding leadership positions in any nation."

This, as any of the nearly 20 million people who've watched the latest Ish video would attest, did not pan out as expected.

Anatomy of a Betrayal

Without getting too deep into spoilers—the video really is worth watching—the crux of the video hinges on a devious plot devised by one player, called Fluixon, in which Saparata was dramatically framed for a large-scale assassination of many of the event's leading players.

"Interestingly, the very first person I ever spoke to on the server was Flux," Saparata told me.

Saparata and Fluixon developed a real friendship, which then carried over into Ish's events. In that previous video, where Saparata was in charge of a nation, Fluixon served as his Vice President.

"That relationship carried into the ‘Rich and Poor’ video experiment, where my trust in him absolutely influenced the storyline,” Saparata says. “Because I trusted him outside the game, I didn’t even realize when he was framing me. Out of game, we both understood that the 'betrayal' wasn’t personal, it was purely for the sake of building a better narrative. After the initial shock, we laughed it off and moved on quickly."

While Saparata is a good sport about it all now, he admits that there were times during the event when tensions with other players were running high. The other players believed that Saparata had not only eliminated many players in cold blood, but also that he'd dishonored the rules of the event by making himself into a main character.

"It’s true, a lot of players were understandably frustrated with me after the big assassination, as many believed I was breaking the repeat rule," Saparata says. "It was tough because I couldn’t defend myself in the moment without breaking immersion. Saying something like 'I’m on the repeat rule, so it couldn’t be me' would have undercut the roleplay experience for everyone else.”

So the plot worked, and Saparata went on the run as hundreds of other players attempted to find and punish him, a journey he logged in a video captured from his own perspective called I Got Hunted by 1000 Players in Ish's Minecraft Civilization.

“Once I was eventually vindicated within the storyline,” Saparata says, “those same players were quick to apologize, and everything smoothed out. So, while there was definitely some tension during the event, it didn’t carry over into real life in any lasting way."

A Villainous Perspective

Fluixon, whose scheming ultimately drove forward the primary events of the video, says that his confidence in his close relationship with Saparata made him more willing to betray him in such elaborate fashion.

"I would have felt a lot worse if I had betrayed someone I didn't know as well who might have thought I was just being an asshole for the sake of it," Fluixon tells me, "but we've worked on enough roleplay events and stories together that I knew he wouldn't take it too hard and would be able to both understand why it was such a compelling narrative plot and make the most out of it as a character himself."

Making the Cut

One thing I was curious about was how players get selected for events like this, especially given that many thousands apply and only a small percentage make the cut. What qualities, I asked Ish, do he and his team look for?

“Mainly it's willingness to roleplay,” Ish says. “Obviously Minecraft is not real life, but you have to kind of pretend like it is real life, right? So we typically try to avoid accepting people who are just PvP brained, and who just want to go around killing people.”

One effective way Ish and his team weed out the PvP-brained players is by requiring everyone who applies to join fill out a written survey explaining their motivations.

“The quality of their application tends to indicate the level of commitments that the player will have in the actual event,” Ish says. “So those are the factors that really allow us to accept some really high quality players: Great builders, great role players. We're really fortunate that we have a lot of people to select from.”

But what about bad actors? What sorts of behaviors tend to get players booted from the event, if they break the rules once it kicks off?

"Hacking is the main one," says Ish. "We always have a few people who decide to X-Ray through the floor to find diamonds or similar stuff like that. So yeah, we boot people occasionally. But not that much, because the application process tends to sift out most of the troublemakers."

Sidebar: Roleplaying Advice from the Masters

Given how effective Saps and Flux were at driving forward a compelling plot in Ish’s video, I asked both of them what tips they’d give to others given the chance to participate in a roleplay event like it in the future:

From Saparata:

“These experiments, especially Ish’s, are fascinating because they blur the line between social experiment and roleplay. Most players don’t create entirely new “characters”, they play versions of themselves, just in a heightened setting. My best advice for anyone who wants to succeed in these events is to find something interesting to commit to and stick with it. Too often, I see people constantly switching up their roleplay just to get screen time, but that can make the story feel less authentic. If you lean into your chosen role and genuinely have fun with it, the story will naturally become more engaging. Above all, remember that these events are meant to be enjoyable, so don’t take them too seriously.”

And from Flux:

“In my opinion, if you want to be a good roleplayer in videos and events like these, you need to be able to do three things:

• Lean into the character you end up playing. Don't try and force it, let the world around you shape the character you become, but once you have that path determined for you try and stick to it and really play into it. That could be anything from a farmer, a politician, a soldier, or something wildly more creative.

• Be willing to take risks. Most players in Ish's events for instance always try and play it safe and do the most conservative actions they can, which is understandable due to the exclusivity and infrequency of the events, but often leads to them playing less interesting characters as a result. It's a good thing that the world is mostly made up of conservative, conflict-averse players for the sake of worldbuilding - the events would be terrible if everyone was trying to be the "main character" all the time, but every now and again its good for players to be willing to dare a little more for the sake of building a more compelling narrative.

• Talk to people and make genuine connections throughout the course of the event. These aren't singleplayer experiences, nor are they sparsely populated SMPs or factions servers. For Ish's events at least, you are participating with one thousand other people. Make the effort to talk and work together with them - collaborate! You're wasting your opportunities if you don't.”

The Massively Multiplayer Future of TV

With his latest video in the bag, Ish is already working on his next event, this one "Purge" themed.

There's just one problem. With the outsized success of his latest video, demand from fans has gotten out of control: Over 60,000 people have already applied to participate. This time, Ish tells me, exactly 1,300 will get in. And just a handful will have what it takes to achieve main character status in the resulting video.

Call it whatever you want: a Minecraft video, a roleplaying scenario, or massively multiplayer reality TV. Whatever it is, it’s hardly recognizable as a game. Instead, what emerges when you talk to players who participate in these events is a view of what they’re doing as something like a learnable artform (or, if you can stomach the pun, a craft).

“Minecraft isn't really just a sandbox game to me anymore,” Fluixon told me. “It's the only environment I know which allows me both the creative freedom to be someone I couldn't otherwise be and do what I couldn't otherwise do, and the ability to connect and play with so many people in such an unrestricted world at the same time.”

Minecraft may have started out as a Lego-like sandbox game about building with blocks, but somewhere along the way, it evolved into something else. Now, says Fluixon, “It's the closest thing that really exists to an immersive digital universe.”

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go watch Canadian kids sell drugs in Minecraft.

I started writing Push to Talk in part because I wanted to highlight some of the very strange ways that video games interact with culture. There are all these weird cultural offshoots from games that most people aren’t aware of. And maybe one of the best examples of this I’ve come across recently is the work of Manofdutch, a poster on X who often goes viral by using Minecraft to build landscapes and architecture inspired by Dutch Golden Age paintings.

I mostly want to just show you what this looks like. What follows is a very short Q&A with Manofdutch, who is a recent university graduate from the Netherlands.

PUSH TO TALK: I wonder if you could speak about your artistic inspirations?

MANOFDUTCH: Mainly Wes Anderson films, especially on my YouTube channel, where I make videos in his style. My builds also have that quality, as well as some inspiration from the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, with the lighting of Rembrandt and Vermeer.

You're doing so many of these beautiful Minecraft builds. What kind of time commitment is going into these? And is this your fulltime thing? (I see your Patreon seems to have a lot of members!)

A lot of time goes into my builds, between the research and building. For example, my most recent map (The Last of Us) took around six months and 1,000+ hours to make, and Corvin Castle was around a month of work. I do not do these as a full-time thing, but rather as something to enjoy. I primarily built these when I was in university and during my internship, when things got stale.

What's your backstory? How'd you get into doing this?

I was kinda bored and wanted to do something creative. And I thought, why not play Minecraft again, when my internship is slow in the off-season? I’m not an architect or designer or in a creative industry. My degree, and hopefully future job, is in health and safety. Maybe chemical safety or a security management position.

Do you think you'll keep doing this stuff once you start a full time job?

Most likely I will either slow down or I will reduce the map size since it does not pay a living wage or any decent amount of money. Most likely I will start next year with a new job! These builds take a lot of time: around two to five months.

Let's talk about a specific creation, like this one (see above). What all went into this, both in terms of the mods and the effort you put into it?

The creation of that castle went as follows: A good friend and awesome map maker, RedlikeRanger, makes cool terrain. I built a giant castle and added my own flair of shaders, which I make myself to really make the build pop (it does lag your PC to around 10fps, but it’s worth it). For the mods, I keep things simple. Conquest Reforged and the Falling Leaves mod to get that cool leaves effect! It wasn’t much effort, since the terrain was already there and I just needed to make the castle and the cinematic viewpoints, which I am very good at.

What do people not understand about this particular slice of the Minecraft community that you think is interesting?

There is still kind of a taboo or something about the Conquest Reforged mod adding all these other blocks and making things rather too realistic—like it’s no longer Minecraft (hahaha). I do understand that vanilla Minecraft is something cool and fun to play, but I mainly use it for artistic expression rather then gameplay.

Coda

I love the idea that some criticize Manofdutch’s preferred mod on the grounds that it’s “no longer Minecraft…” as if transforming a piece of software into something new is somehow a bad thing. It is an interesting question, though: At what point does a video game become something else? Somewhere the line between “game” and “3D voxel art sculpting software” gets blurred.

In Minecraft, as in all things, the only certainty is change. Change in our lives, and in the built environments that surround us. If you’re a young person in the modern world your environment almost certainly includes this game, which has sold over 350 million copies—more than any other in history. But the Minecraft that players find now bears little resemblance to the alpha version I bought off of Notch’s website in 2010.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll publish a series of interviews with creative people who’ve been working to change Minecraft in unexpected ways, beginning with the director of a full-length Minecraft movie that has earned (so far) 17 million views. There are many strange things happening in this little digital world made of cubes. Was Minecraft ever just a game? Or was it the first emergence of something new, something for which we didn’t yet have the language? We’ll see.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go do some crayon drawings with my 5-year-old.

One problem is that voices representing the most extreme worldviews tend to dominate the conversation. The stories told about AI's looming impact on games tend to reduce down into one of the following visions:

1. We are building God (and also The Matrix) inside a datacenter in Milwaukee

or

2. Machines that feast on stolen art are drying up the oceans, and the only source of water left on Earth will be the tears of unemployed former game developers.

Neither of these visions have much to do with observable reality.1 And the more tightly people clings to one of these visions, the more difficulty they have in understanding and reacting reasonably to novel applications of AI tech.

Far and away the clearest example of this as it applies to games has been the recent emergence of “world models,” basically a new form of interactive video where individual video frames are generated dynamically in response to user inputs.

The first, most rudimentary version of these models appeared last year with Google’s GameNGen prototype (built around Doom). This was quickly followed by other AI-generated world models based on other games, like Etched and Decart’s Oasis, a hallucinatory AI simulation of Minecraft that was made playable to the public as a browser app.

Approached on their own terms, these were early demos of a technology with uncertain—but definitely interesting—possibilities.

But that’s not how many saw them. Here’s one especially confused reaction to the Oasis demo:

This is a person who is fundamentally missing the point. A demo like this is attempting to show what interactive entertainment might be like on computers that are probabilistic instead of deterministic. It’s not about literally making a new way to play Minecraft. The point is to inspire people to imagine: Wow, what if they developed this model further and trained it on things in addition to Minecraft?

But Alex thought he was looking at just another Minecraft clone. If you’re operating with a broken worldview of what AI is, you actually can’t understand what you’re looking at.

Here’s another example, this time with a person reacting to a similar world model tech demo from Microsoft that happened to be based on Quake II:

There’s a lot to unpack here. Is the idea that this tech is going to harm the developers of Quake II? The reaction only makes sense if you’re predisposed to view every new AI tool as de facto harmful to artists and developers.

In any case, at least one person disagreed with Ruby Ranger's take here: the actual lead developer of Quake II, John Carmack:

Any person with a shred of curiosity ought to be gobsmacked by an interaction like this. One of history’s most famous games programmers just replied to your sassy tweet to disagree with you. How might you respond?

Instead of asking why Carmack thinks the demo is impressive, the poster took it as a chance to explain to the creator of Doom why he’s wrong. This in turn prompted Carmack to write a thoughtful take on AI tool development and its likely impact on games:

Carmack is introducing a completely different vision for analyzing AI models: not as a uniquely evil or godlike type of computer, but as just another tool. In this case specifically, Carmack sees a demo that fits into a long tradition of software “power tools” that includes ones he himself invented.

You can disagree with Carmack’s take, but let’s adopt his model for a second. There’s a lot to be said for the idea of treating individual AI applications as just another power tool for devs. Slowly, surely, specific AI tools are emerging now that can do things like generate 3D character models from concept art, automatically detect joints for rigging, and speed up the animation process by interpolating frames when given a starting and ending point. Future versions of these apps will make game development faster and easier, but they're hardly set to make human creatives obsolete. To make really high-quality stuff using these tools, they need to be wielded by skilled human operators. And in many cases these tools aren’t even replacing legacy game dev software like Blender. They’re integrating directly with existing tech stacks—just one more tool in the toolbox for artists.

Certainly, many devs say that AI coding tools are dropping their costs and dev time now, and that stuff should only get better. But as it stands today, even AI power-users say that today’s AI tools aren’t good enough to build high-quality games—at least not yet.

One more model couldn’t hurt

I like the way Carmack thinks about AI, but I don’t want to make the case that he’s definitively, 100% correct. The point is that there are other ways of viewing AI, even if you add the “it’s all just tools” model to your toolbox.

Even that way of thinking is inadequate to describe some of the things that are beginning to be achieved with new foundational types of AI, especially the most cutting edge stuff happening in the world model space. If you haven’t already, you really need to watch this demo of Genie 3, Google DeepMind’s new world model:

This, of course, is the same core technology that powered the earlier experiments with Doom, Minecraft, and Quake II… except much more advanced. And it happened very quickly: less than a year after the publication of Google’s GameNGen paper. In fact, the connections go deeper than that. Last week I had a chance to chat with Genie 3 co-lead Jack Parker-Holder for the a16z speedrun newsletter, and he stressed that one big unlock for Genie 3’s advances came from his team’s collab with Shlomi Fruchter, one of the co-authors of the GameNGen paper.

Whatever you call this new branch of the AI tech tree, “interactive video” or “world models,” it’s obviously something different. And yet, this is the cynical, incurious way the only major video game site to cover Genie 3 framed it:

We are suffering from a dearth of imagination, or maybe just a lack of adequate mental frameworks to make sense of this stuff. Truly new things like world models are not AI Gods, or Art Regurgitators, or even Just Another Tool. They are something new. And when we encounter something that doesn’t fit neatly within our existing worldviews—our models for understanding reality—we have to attempt, in a spirit of curiosity, to understand that thing on its own terms.

Above: A Genie 3 “world” generated by Google DeepMind researcher Philip J. Ball

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go play Quake II.

1

Recent data shows that concerns about AI’s impact on the environment are pretty seriously overblown—especially when comparing AI usage with everyday activities like eating hamburgers, heating your home, or taking showers. University of Oxford Senior Researcher Hannah Ritchie has done multiple excellent deep dives on LLM electricity usage and likely impacts on carbon emissions which are worth reading.

We’re in the process of teaching my oldest son how to read. He touches the letters with his finger, whispering the sounds. Muh- muh- monkey. M is for monkey! It’s beautiful to watch, and my heart leaps at the idea that soon he might discover the joy of reading books for himself.

We’re trying to nudge him in that direction, but he already has an inner drive to know more about words—about what things are called, what signs and symbols mean, and how to use them. Is that drive innate in most kids?

What about in adults?

I keep thinking back to this horrifying Apple ad that came out late last year. I’m not gonna describe it. Just watch it below (or save yourself and close this tab).

What to say? It’s one of the most insulting advertisements ever aired.

You, the viewer, are meant to identify with Warren: a lazy, barely literate slob with the attention span of a child. Luckily for Warren, Apple Intelligence is there to rewrite his emails and impress the bossman. Be like Warren! Write smarter.

I don’t have a good theory of mind for Apple’s ad team. How were people expected to react to this? I don’t have an issue with the product being advertised. It’s a bog-standard LLM tool which plenty of people use to clean up their emails. Writing is a genuinely miserable task for many people, after all, and it would be nice to be able to tap a button to instantly professionalize a sloppy draft. You can imagine how the actual product might be useful.

But why is the guy using it—an Apple customer!—depicted as a total moron?

The most generous possible interpretation might be that Apple intends for us to laugh at Warren while still basically identifying with his problem. I think this is probably how they thought about it. No competent marketing department is trying to intentionally insult their users.

But the less generous interpretation is clear: Apple thinks you’re stupid. CNET’s Bridget Carey made this case sharply back when this ad first came out last year:

Let’s set aside the intentions of the Apple ad department. Regardless of the intent, the actual message of the ad itself is nonsense, for reasons anyone could pinpoint just by asking: what happens next?

The selling point of the Apple ad is all about the first-order effects of using their AI product. If you use Apple Intelligence to fix your awful writing, you’ll look smarter and impress your boss. Very cool! Except, wait a second. What happens next for Warren? If a baboon like him can figure out how to use Apple Intelligence, surely at least half of his coworkers will figure it out as well, right? (This would be a second-order effect.) And then (third-order effects incoming) Warren’s boss will no longer be impressed by the quality of Warren’s AI-assisted writing, because it’ll look exactly like everyone else’s. Uh-oh! Now Warren is back where he started! He’s no longer writing smarter. He’s writing on par.

There’s another possible second-order effect. What happens if Warren’s boss walks over to Warren’s desk to have a conversation about that email? If Warren’s boss has any perceptual abilities at all, he’s likely to notice that Warren-in-Person seems to have about 40 fewer IQ points than Warren-over-Email. At that point, (third-order effect incoming) Warren’s boss is likely to realize that Warren used an AI to write that email. Oh no, Warren! You’ve been exposed!

The post-literate society

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how society is becoming post-literate. After the OECD conducted a global study on “adult skills” last year, they found that literacy rates are declining almost everywhere. “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” according to an interview with the study’s organizers in the Financial Times.

This isn’t some new trend introduced by AI. Forty years ago people were sounding the alarm about the possible negative effects of reorienting our entire society around image-based entertainment. You don’t even have to think back that far: We’ve suffered through eight or nine years of the pivot to video.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but the literacy problem is likely part of a longer-term trend that’s emerging in data in a bunch of other troubling ways. Young people are not doing so hot!

“Nobody reads!” some say. “So you’ve gotta reach people where they’re at.”

Maybe they’re right. With even highly-educated kids unable to read books, the actual, real-world impacts of dropping literacy rates are becoming clearer.

Literacy isn’t a binary thing. There are many shades of grey between “highly literate” and “can’t read.” As pointed out by the OECD reps, a true count of illiterate people in a modern society would include millions of adults who can make sense of most of the written content they encounter while navigating their daily lives—but who can’t enjoy books intended for adults or express their own thoughts effectively via writing. This will be one of those things that might be obscured in the gathered statistics. For instance, even if the number of reported books read per year by adults stays flat, the literacy rate is still dropping if those books are less complex, less rich.

Warren, the unfortunate soul we encounter in the Apple commercial, isn’t actually intended to be understood as a totally illiterate person, but he’s less literate than the people around him. We can assume from the medium of the message (a mass-audience television ad) that Apple assumes the audience is like Warren. The statistics say they’re correct.

What happens next, if Warren doesn’t learn to express himself? If he’s spinning in circles and playing with tape all day, what’s gonna happen to Warren?

How to save your mind

Every parent I know has been worrying recently about how to prepare their kids for the world that’s coming. For my own three kids, I’m increasingly convinced the best thing is to help them become not just literate but very highly literate.

But the problem isn’t just about literacy. The thing that’s gonna ultimate screw Warren—were his fictional life extended into a multi-episode series—is his inability to communicate like an adult in any scenario where he doesn’t have Apple Intelligence on hand.

Consider the second and third order effects. If you aren’t comfortable expressing your own thoughts, you’re going to fall apart the first time somebody questions or challenges you in person. You’re gonna embarrass yourself at work. You’ll get into stupid fights with your loved ones caused by misunderstandings.

What happens next is: Warren is not gonna make it.

People that learn how to read and write well tend to do better in life because they’re able to think more clearly and see more clearly. Most of the modern world, in all its boiling chaos, is only really knowable to us in concepts best expressed using words. The better you understand how to use words, the better you’ll understand how to navigate the world. This won’t change, even in a so-called post-literate society.

At some point, when my kids are ready, I’ll tell them something like this:

Pick up a classic book and read it so closely that you internalize its author’s worldview. Find a nice journal and write down the thoughts that are too complicated to express out loud. Study On Writing Well by William Zinsser so you can begin to understand the logic that underlies sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. And then, once you’ve started to understand how words work, you have the tools to start to ask better questions about how things fit together. There’s a positive feedback loop that kicks in if you actually give your time over to reading and writing. You get better at making sense of the words in front of you, and at using those words yourself. And by learning how to write well, you will necessarily learn how to think well.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go read some emails.

I spent last week’s newsletter complaining about AI-generated content. This week I bring you an interview with the guy behind the most infamous AI-generated video clip in recent memory.

The true appeal of X (née Twitter) has always been that it’s a place where any random person can post something that throws millions around the world into chaos for days on end.

One example: A few weeks ago a Midjourney user pissed off the whole games industry with a 5-second GIF, captioned with just three characters:

If you don’t wanna click through to the post, here’s the full video:

It’s definitely more interesting than most AI art. The way it renders different layers based on distance is striking, and those sprite-based arms do look great. I can think of a few games that look similar to this, though nothing I’m aware of looks exactly like it. At first many commenters assumed this was an actual, playable game, but the OP confirmed in comments that he used Midjourney to generate the clip.

So how’d the internet react?

Mostly, people split along five basic lines:

1) This visual style already exists:

2) This visual style doesn’t yet exist but I’ve attempted to re-create it (I love this one):

3) This visual style will never and could never exist.

4) This visual style does not yet exist, but it could in theory:

5) This visual style did not exist before this week, but it does now thanks to an AI model even more advanced than Midjourney:

So that’s a lot of basically irreconcilable takes on a five-second clip.

But there was yet one more take, proffered by the OP himself, and it was the boldest of them all:

This doesn’t exist yet, but I’m assembling a team to make it.

What chutzpah! Why in heaven’s name would a Midjourney prompt guy be the one to actually build this? And yet, two weeks later, our hero reappeared with an announcement that he’d formed a new games studio.

Raising the stakes even further, the intrepid poster said on his Discord that the game is currently being made without assistance from AI.

What! Any reasonable person would have some doubts about this. And the response online so far has been skeptical:

Sure, it’s a longshot. But you’ve gotta admit, it’s kinda fun that this guy has effectively staked his online reputation on delivering something almost nobody believes is possible. Like, this can really only go one of two ways: Either Desimulate ships a game that delivers on this visual style, or he won’t.

Alea iacta est. The die is cast.

Either way, the responses to the original tweet were so wild and varied that I wondered how the original poster felt about it all. I DMed Desimulate and requested a live interview.

He agreed.

What follows is a condensed transcript of our conversation.

PUSH TO TALK: So what’s your story? Why’d you start posting these Midjourney clips?

DESIMULATE: Yeah, so I'm an engineer. I've been doing CS for a long time. I’ve got three kids. Sometime around the election, I saw that people were getting paid for posting on X. Some were getting like 1,500 bucks. I was like dude, I could use an extra 1,500 bucks. It can't be that hard. I already work on my computer all day. So I speedran monetization. I put in 30 days, just to see if I could do it. And then it was just way too much, keeping up with the internet. I was way too online. It takes a lot of paying attention to your phone.

But then I saw these guys posting AI art, and I didn’t realize it was AI-generated. I asked one of these guys how he made it, and he was like: Midjourney. I had no idea. So I just started dabbling in it, and then one thing led to another and within a month I was super addicted. So I transitioned my account to posting art.

So did you get monetized on X?

No, I never made any money.

(Laughing) Oh my God.

They never paid me. I was hitting them up for two months. It said “your payment is coming” and they never sent me anything. And then they just sent me an email and they were like, you've been paused, your monetization has been paused. For no reason. I was like, great, sick. And this was just when I started gaining a lot of traction with my art. I went from, I don't know, 3,000 followers to 8,000 followers in two weeks or something like that. And then it blew up from 8,000 to 12,000. It was just pretty steadily increasing on my account. So at that point I was just doing it for the love of the game. And I got really into it.

I like to say Midjourney’s not just a tool. It’s an art engine, because there are all these different ways that you can create with it. There are srefs, you can do mood boards, and then you can train your own model, and it learns as you go, and you can combine all this stuff together. I just got obsessed with making something unique, and that post was the epitome of that for me. And it kind of came out of nowhere.

In order to get srefs, there's not always a library or anything like that. Sometimes people farm them and then they post libraries and you can buy the library. But when I started this in June, this was on the new engine, so the srefs had just released and nobody had farmed them yet. So I spent a month mining these srefs. I mined 5,000 codes.

I have no idea what that means. What does that mean when you say you were mining sref codes?

So, you just run a prompt. Maybe a knight standing in front of a castle. And the srefs are these codes that are weighted to make the model shift toward a certain style. One might be like a pencil sketch, but then another could be a pencil sketch in a frame, but then another could be a pencil sketch with a little bit of red. They vary ever so slightly. And you can find them by generating random srefs and applying them, one at a time.

Oh, and so you basically A/B test them to see what they do?

Yes. Over and over and over again. I’ve literally run 15,000 prompts.

My thing is going really deep into the srefs. I have styles that are like 12 to 15 srefs.

I got it, and so you wanna keep those particular srefs secret, because that’s the secret sauce to generating stuff like the “omw” clip?

Yes. I'll even show you, I have an SRF farming folder with like 20,000 generations.

Okay, so this really leads into my next question. Obviously you have respect for these tools. You're putting in serious time and effort with these tools and exploring the boundaries of their use cases. So that make it even more funny that, as you said in your Discord, there’s zero AI in your dev workflow on the game you’re working on. I mean, why not? It’s not like you’re scared of the stuff. Why not use AI tools to make this game?

Well, right now, the tools aren’t really good enough.

(Laughing) For real?

Yeah I mean, the meshes are probably good enough to make a basic game. Something small. But this is a game that is kind of demanding, right? It's going to be a real fantasy RPG. So at the end of the day, it's going to have to be performant. The 3D generation stuff right now… the meshes are just not up to snuff. They are way too many triangles, polygons, and a lot of them kind of get messed up. And so it actually ends up taking more time to clean them than it would to just like start from the beginning. So we just use it as a visual reference.

I really did not expect you to say this.

Yeah. It's sort of a challenge, right? Can we do this with traditional tools? Because people are saying it couldn't be done. I realized pretty quick that if I was going to do it, I was going to need some real game devs to help me out.

I'm a software engineer. I've got 10 years under my belt, but using engines, it was just gonna take me so long to get off the ground. That’s why I hired a team. I knew this was gonna be a battle because I inspired a lot of people and there's gonna be people out there trying to make the game too, right? And so there's a little bit of a rush to actually get something going.

So let me ask you a classic venture capitalist question. This is one that, in VC, we would ask anybody pitching a company: Why are you the one to do it?

It's a good question. I've got the vision, and everything starts with that vision. I've got the passion to make it happen. In two weeks, I've interviewed 40-plus people, brought a real team together of real game devs, started building, designing the game, and we've made a ton of progress. Obviously everything is in an R&D state. But I am committed to making it happen.

You've kind of put a stake in the ground. You've put your name, or at least your handle, on the line, right? You've come out and said very publicly, you're going to try to do this. You're either gonna prove the haters wrong or this might be like a dev hell thing for years of your life. I hope it's not the latter, you know?

Yeah, but also I'm the OP, right? Like I was the first one to do the thing. I started the movement and so I carry that weight in... like I've got all the followers with it, people are watching to see if we can make it. Or they see me as a source of controversy, which is really good for marketing, because, like they say, there's no such thing as bad press. And the more controversy the work creates, the better it is for us because people will be talking about it.

We talked a bit about why you’d try to make it with a traditional game engine versus AI tools. And you talked me through the limitations that the AI tools have. Now let me ask a more philosophical question. Why make it at all? Like, why take that generated clip and try to make it into an interactive experience? What's the motivation there?

I've always wanted to make a video game, my whole life. I’m from Michigan. There's not really a lot to do here, half the year. It's gray and cold. You spend a lot of time inside. As a kid, I played lots of video games. So since I was a kid, I've been thinking about making a video game. And you might ask, why didn't you ever try before? I actually have tried before, but it just was one of those things that… it never felt like it could be successful for me.

But now, after we posted the clip, everybody was saying they wanted the game. And when it comes to games, half the battle, if not more, is getting people interested in your game. Because everybody's trying to make games, right? So the fact that there was that much interest, that quickly, and that many eyes on it. And within 24 hours we had 4.5k followers on the studio account. We've got like 500 people in the Discord, I've got over a thousand people on the mailing list already. In less than a week, we’ve got lots of people paying attention to the game and lots of people interested in the community and so, to me, that's an opportunity that is too good to turn down.

It's almost easier to start from having aggregated the demand for a game and then making it, versus making a game and then trying to generate demand for it.

Yeah. It was like an accidental layup to myself, you know? May as well take it.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go find something else to get mad about on Twitter.

Bad news: I’ve been thinking about AI again.

Anywhere we go online, we find ourselves squinting. Is that AI generated? We freeze, eyes narrowing at strange images, supposed gameplay clips, even songs. Halfway through reading a politician’s statement, we spot the infamous “it’s not X — it’s Y” construction, before swiping away in disgust.

All this squinting is starting to feel like a cognitive burden—like some ever-increasing percentage of our brains’ RAM is now constantly being allocated to the task of identifying human or robot provenance. Did that em-dash in the previous sentence trip you up? It slowed me down. I spent a few seconds debating whether or not to replace it because of the association that particular punctuation now has with ChatGPT-assisted writing. That’s despite the fact I’ve been using the trusty “—” for decades.1

I find myself squinting for hints of AI reliance constantly, even in my own writing, which is certified AI Free™. I’m not terribly offended when others get assistance from AI to write, because writing is hard and most people find it terribly painful. But I—maybe arrogantly—believe my own writing will always be “better” than AI generated writing, if only because the words I type are an authentic expression of my irreplicable, God-given human spirit.2

At this point I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t feel at least some cognitive dissonance when thinking about AI. Even if you lean optimistic (as I do), you’ve got to admit things are getting real weird, real fast. And the more bothered you are by AI’s omnipresence in media, the worse the cognitive burden of AI squinting becomes.

A quick example:

Last week’s newsletter about the overwhelming deluge of new game releases featured an interview with Wanderbot, a YouTuber with 500k subscribers who says he typically gets over 30 emails per day from indie game devs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something Wanderbot told me about the effect his own AI squinting is having on his motivation for his job.

I’ll just quote directly from what he wrote to me:

The main thing I'm worried about is generative AI. Frankly, I hate everything about it, and I'll fully admit it's making me lose interest in a lot of media, games included. Seeing the sheer amount of game developers (indie and AAA alike) throwing artists, voice actors, writers, musicians, etc... under the bus to save a buck is infuriating, especially when those models were built upon those people's work. I've received emails for and rejected countless games over the past three years for using generative AI, and that number is rising alarmingly.

I'd be less bothered if developers properly labeled their usage of AI on Steam, but for every developer that does it feels like two more actively refuse to do so and it's making my efforts to avoid covering their games far more time consuming. It's not very fun having to scrutinize every game to this degree, and rather than wearing down my resistance to seeing AI in games, the increase of its usage is just pushing me away from games in general.

—Wanderbot, in an email to Push to Talk

This is a person feeling discouraged. He’s becoming less motivated to do the thing he’s dedicated the last decade of his life toward.

I don’t really know what the solution is here. But I’ll make two predictions:

1. Many people (maybe even a majority?) are going to feel basically unbothered spending time on an internet where a huge percentage of content is synthetic. Arguably, we’ve already been living in that world for a long time.

2. But another significant slice of the audience is ultimately going to decide to withdraw away to venues less exposed to synthetic content. This is already happening now as people withdraw their attention from platforms with For You feeds in favor of private group chat and Discord servers. But new venues are going to emerge.

This latter group will obviously include the self-identified anti-AI crowd, but I think the demand for these new spaces will be bigger than that. There’s only so much cognitive burden anyone can take. Soon, it’ll seem like a basic cognitive security practice to limit time spent on the open web.

What you really need is another farm fresh, pesticide free newsletter. So…

Subscribe now

There are not all that many similarities between the video game business and the world of book publishing. But last year a very similar crisis struck both.

It’s a problem of too many and not enough. Too many games/books, and not enough players/readers. In both cases, an overabundance of content is being met with growing apathy.

For instance: More games than ever were released on Steam last year, while the number of games earning over 1,000 reviews (one reasonable proxy for success) didn’t change much. There are more games than ever, and the same number of winners.

Meanwhile over in the book biz, the news is worse. In a viral essay last year titled “No one buys books,” Substack writer shared data from a 2022 antitrust lawsuit against Penguin Random House suggesting that half of professionally-published books in the United States sell fewer than a dozen copies. Only 10 percent sell more than 2,000 copies. And what about the biggest hits? Out of the many hundreds of thousands of new, traditionally published books each year, the CEO of Penguin Random House testified that probably only around 50 sell more than 500,000 copies.1

This is a problem that’s bigger than books or games. Supply of new creative works of almost all types is outpacing demand for those works.

In the process, many institutions that were built specifically to help people make sense of the world’s creative output are beginning to break down.

YouTube: The Magic Games Marketing Machine

One of the many differences between the books and games industries has to do with the size and vitality of the media environment surrounding them.

BookTok can drive sales of books, sure. But it’s small potatoes compared to gaming’s dominance on YouTube, where creators with millions of subscribers use the “Let’s Play” format to make millions of viewers aware of new games on a daily basis.

YouTube’s importance to the games ecosystem really can’t be overstated: Nearly two-thirds (64%) of surveyed gamers say YouTube is the place they go to find out about new games.2 And as we saw in last week’s post about Balatro, game developers often credit YouTubers when explaining how their games went viral.

But no media institution remains dominant forever. In fact, each of the past three decades has seen a handoff from one form of media to another:

• In the 90s, print magazines were the primary media institution that helped players make sense of the creative output of the video game industry.

• In the 2000s, this role shifted over to websites and blogs like IGN (founded in 1996), GameSpot (also ‘96), Eurogamer (1999) and Kotaku (2004).

• In the 2010s, the websites and blogs gave way to the rise of streamers and YouTubers. Twitch launched in 2011. PewDiePie became the most-subscribed-to channel on YouTube in 2013, and a million Let’s Play channels followed. By the end of the decade the handoff was complete. YouTube was undeniably the primary media institution for people who wanted to find out about games.

Now, as the number of games released annually rises, YouTubers—especially those who go out of their way to cover independent games—are struggling to keep up.

Take Wanderbot for example. He’s a YouTuber with 500,000 subscribers who says he’s “on a personal mission to play as many cool videogames as humanly (or inhumanly) possible.” Wanderbot tells Push to Talk that in the 11 years he’s been running his channel, it’s never been harder to keep up with games.

“My pitches per day have gone up massively since about 2019 or so,” he said in an email exchange. “Pre-2020, I felt great if I could find 1-2 new games per week that fit my interests/niche/bare minimum requirements for quality, which worked fine when I was still doing Let's Plays. Post-2020, the sheer quantity of new releases is so high that I can only cover roughly 10-25% of games that fit those same criteria, and only as a one-off impressions video rather than a full playthrough.”

One thing that has changed dramatically in recent years is the popularity of “outreach lists” for content creators. Because Wanderbot has over half a million subscribers, his contact info is automatically included on many outreach lists.

As a result, “I get a minimum of ~30 emails per day from unique developers who are either asking for coverage or just trying to catch my interest,” he says.

That’s during normal times. During major events like Steam Next Fest, Wanderbot says he sometimes gets over 100 pitch emails per day. This has become such a problem that he’s begun searching for some sort of filtering solution to cut down on the noise. He says that he’s considering making a second email address for developers, PR reps, and publishers that he already knows and trusts so he can “prioritize people who I generally trust to send me decent games.”

Ultimately, the sheer number of new games has come to feel like a burden, even for someone like Wanderbot who is explicitly looking for new games to play and feature: “To be honest, I'm not really excited for how much the release numbers are scaling up for this year and going into the future,” he says. “The systems we have available just aren't built for this kind of volume.”

Sidebar: The Machine Breaks Down

I’ve written at length already about the evolution of sponsored streams, which have become the go-to way for games marketers with a budget to guarantee coverage of new titles from otherwise overwhelmed streamers.

As more marketing money entered the streaming landscape, and competitive pressures ramped up, some smaller developers have begun to feel that they have no choice but to also spend on streamer attention. This, however, is not really a workable solution.

Oriol Cosp Arqué is a game dev behind titles like The Ouroboros King (2023) and Gods vs Horrors (2025). One of the things Arqué has noticed is that the expected value from views of games on YouTube is lower than you might expect, leading him to argue that the streamer sponsorship model is broken.

“Gods vs Horrors got relatively low coverage during development,” he tells Push to Talk, “and after seeing fellow indies in the genre sponsoring content creators, I decided to run a sponsorship campaign too. I made sponsorship offers to 45 creators based on sharing 50% of the value I expected to get from the streams and was declined by all except the two streamers who had previously played the game (which would have probably played the game on release). I'm probably never actively seeking sponsorships again.”

Ultimately, Arqué arrived at the same assessment of sponsored streams and VODs that even many bigger-budget marketing departments have come to in recent years: “The sponsorship prices are too high compared to the value they provide to indie devs.”

Pop Off, Player

Imagine the world from a big YouTuber’s perspective.

If you think about gaming’s too many and not enough problem, one thing quickly becomes clear: There isn’t actually much incentive to be the first to cover a new game.

There are some qualifications one could make here. It’s not good to be weeks late to a new title, because then you risk boring the audience with something they’ve already grown tired of. But if you’re the very first person to stream a game, you have to overcome the same hurdle game developers themselves face: convincing players that a new game is worth their time and attention. You don’t even know whether the demand is going to be there.

You’d much rather be able to start off a video by saying “alright, a lot of you in the comments and the Discord have been begging me to play this game, so I’m giving it a shot.”

Remember, supply of new games is outpacing demand for new games. This causes problems for YouTubers, too. Like devs, they also operate in a world driven by demand for games. They just capture it at an earlier stage of the funnel. So creators are incentivized to put their creative energy toward covering games that already have proven demand—not unlike a publisher or investor!

A lot of indie devs have the mistaken perception that their game will “pop off” if a big enough YouTuber plays it. Increasingly, things are working in the exact reverse order. Because most YouTubers can only afford to play a few of the many games sent their way, they will naturally prioritize games that are already popping off.

But then who will sort through all the new games to help the really great ones get discovered in the first place?

I asked Wanderbot how he thinks about his own role in the games ecosystem. Is it primarily as entertainment for viewers? Or is there also some element of hoping to lift up indie devs?

“Back when I was doing Let's Play series, I definitely saw myself primarily as entertainment while still trying to uplift indie devs,” he wrote back. “Now it's definitely the latter… in light of how miserable corporate AAA development seems to be (especially with the recent layoffs) it feels like the best thing I can do for the games industry is to highlight and uplift as many indie developers/games as possible.”

Nobody can save all the indie games. But it’s nice that someone is trying.

That’s it for this week.

I’m gonna go play one of the 37 roguelikes that came out since Monday.

This was part three in a series of pieces examining the game dev > YouTuber > player pipeline.

• Check out part one: How to Get YouTubers to Play Your Game

• And part two: The Word-of-Mouth Magic Behind Breakout Hits Like Balatro

It seemed like Balatro came out of nowhere.

Solo dev LocalThunk was an unknown quantity when he dropped his “Poker roguelike” on Steam last year. But it turned out to be one of the biggest breakout hits of the year—and maybe ever—selling over 5 million copies on Steam alone.

Mr. ‘Thunk is an intensely private person: his real name isn’t public, and he rarely participates in interviews. So it came as a surprise a few months ago when he published this incredibly detailed and beautifully written essay detailing his experience leading up to the release of the game.1

In the piece, LocalThunk describes how Balatro gained traction with players before its release. Nearly a year prior to launch, in fact, there was a massive inflection point.

The essay, titled “The Balatro Timeline,” breaks it down beat-by-beat:

• In May 2023, the same month LocalThunk uploaded the first public Beta build of Balatro on Steam, he only had 48 wishlists on Steam.

• By June 10th of that year, Balatro still only had 183 wishlists on Steam, but he had already been contacted by a scout for Playstack, which eventually became his publisher. (Shout out to Playstack for being insanely early to catch one of the best-selling digital card games ever.)

• Between mid-June and July 2023, things accelerated very rapidly. First, LocalThunk writes, “Dan Gheesling plays Balatro on his stream. This is a massive streamer for my game (and a great guy!), and it starts making my wishlist numbers spike.”

• Later, Gheesling introduced the game to another streamer, Northernlion. From here, interest in the game exploded. “By end of July, Balatro had 28,661 wishlists on Steam,” LocalThunk writes.

As work on the game progressed, player excitement only grew. By the end of October 2023 the game had 77,380 wishlists on Steam, and LocalThunk says the stress was beginning to get to him:

My sleep and my heart are getting worse. Every few nights I need to sleep sitting upright on the couch because sleeping while lying down kept getting interrupted by my heart. I stupidly thought that I couldn’t handle going to the doctor while dealing with all the dev and business stuff swirling around at the time. I felt totally overwhelmed.

—LocalThunk in The Balatro Timeline

The rest of the essay is a gripping read, as LocalThunk details how his mental and physical health deteriorated as hype for the game soared beyond all expectations and the game’s launch neared.

The pressure only increased as demand grew. By the time Balatro launched in February of 2024, it had exactly 208,401 wishlists on Steam. Even with those strong numbers, the game outperformed even the wildest expectations LocalThunk and his publishers had for it. How did it happen?

To me, the most intriguing part of this story came during that early massive spike in June/July 2023. In six weeks, the game went from 183 wishlists to nearly 30k. I’m a marketer at heart, so I can’t help but be enamored with inflection points—those magical moments when a basically flat line on a chart suddenly goes 📈.2

So I wondered: if Dan Gheesling’s video about Balatro (and his subsequent advocacy for it with other streamers) did indeed cause its inflection point, how did Gheesling hear about the game in the first place?

Death of the Inbox

I decided to hit up Gheesling directly. I was curious: Maybe LocalThunk had sent him a really clean email about the game?

This was not the case.

“I probably delete four to five emails a day that have a lot of emojis in the title and that say ‘Steam key attached,’” Gheesling told me. “It’s really been hard to find the hidden gems because there's just been this onslaught of games. It's really, really difficult now to penetrate an email box. I very rarely will play a game that's just sent in as a blind email.”

There are some exceptions to this, Gheesling says. It helps if developers include an animated GIF of their game in an email. He also notes that it’s rare to receive a message that’s been personalized in any way, as many developers use services to mass-distribute Steam keys to streamers. But even these tactics might not make a difference, he admits. “It's probably anywhere between 10 and 25 Steam keys a week, so I don't even look at them at this point, unfortunately.”

If it wasn’t pitched by LocalThunk, then how did Gheesling actually discover Balatro? Remember, when Gheesling first picked up the game, it was only available as a beta and had wishlists in the hundreds, not thousands.

“I have a community Discord,” Gheesling explains, “and there's a room in there where people drop game suggestions. I check out a lot of the recommendations from people within the community because they kind of understand what games do well on the channel and also games I enjoy playing.”

Balatro, Gheesling says, was one of these community recommendations.

Word-of-Mouth as the Foundational Layer

The most mysterious force in marketing is word-of-mouth growth.

You can run the most polished ads, the most clever influencer campaign, with the spiciest viral social media posts—and if you don’t get word-of-mouth growth, you will get nowhere. The size of your budget is worth jack-all if, ultimately, people don’t pick up what you’re putting down and move the message for you.

Conversely, you can be a complete rando with no budget whatsoever and 183 wishlists on Steam, and if your word-of-mouth is strong enough you can run a generational pre-launch campaign that sells 5 million copies. The difference is in the WoM.

One of the many questions we might ask about word-of-mouth is: How do I know if the thing I’m making is going to have it?

Earlier in LocalThunk’s blog, we get a hint.

In June of 2022, a very early stage of development, LocalThunk writes that he shared a copy of the game with some friends. A couple of months went by, and then one of those friends reached back out with “very high praise.” It was “unexpectedly high.”

He mentions that he has played the beta for dozens of hours.

In all my years of sharing projects with friends I had never received feedback like that. I couldn’t believe it, and it really pushed me over the edge to fully flesh out this idea. It was really great knowing that this game was actually being enjoyed by someone I know, and I wanted to prove to him, my other friends, my partner, my family, and myself that I could make something really fun and interesting.

—LocalThunk

It’s tempting for game devs to think of big streamers as being mere gatekeepers—as the first test that can make or break your game’s ability to reach players. But in truth, there is something more fundamental at play. It’s the ground beneath the streamers that enables them to hear about your game in the first place.

At that foundational layer, there is a question: Can your game make someone care enough to sing your praises?

That’s the first test.

And that’s it for this week.

If you really loved this article, spare some WoM and tell your friends to…

Over the next few weeks I’ll be publishing a series of pieces examining the game dev > YouTuber > player pipeline. This was part two.

Check out part one: How to Get YouTubers to Play Your Game.

Reddit posts are a bit like restroom wall graffiti: generally written by cynical degenerates, occasionally funny, and rarely worth reading.

But this week a top post on r/gamedev—provocatively titled The email that got me 6,000 wishlists on Steam—turned out to be unusually valuable for understanding effective marketing communication. The OP couldn’t embed screenshots in his post (very cool website) so I contacted the poster, a game dev named Jordan O’Leary, and he kindly provided the goods, shown below:

Crucially, beneath his email signature, O’Leary included this gameplay GIF:

The result: One day later the YouTuber in question posted a glowing preview of the game that drove 80,000 views and 6,000 wishlists. Within the week another YouTuber—one O’Leary hadn’t even contacted—posted his own video which earned over 96,000 views. How did that happen?

“I had passed out a lot of extra keys to the first guy,” O’Leary told me. “I'm imagining that he must've passed it along, but I'm not sure. I had given out tons of keys at that point.”

I like O’Leary’s outreach email a lot. It’s great comms. But in the comments on his Reddit thread, others weren’t so sure. Some speculated as to why the email worked so well. Maybe it was the personable tone, one suggested. “It's hard to know, maybe OP just got lucky,” another replied. Several posters debated the merits of O’Leary’s choice to withhold a Steam key in the initial email. “Usually sending an email without a steam key (or free demo) and without a press kit is a red flag for content creators,” wrote one user, before adding with a catty sneer: “so I'm surprised it worked but I'm happy for you!”

Why emails like this work

I’ve got a contrarian take on the question of including Steam keys in cold emails (more on that below), but first let’s examine why this email works as a marketing communication.

A few reasons:

• It’s concise - The body of the email is barely longer than a tweet: 289 characters. No irrelevant backstory or time-wasting intro. The description is one sentence that successfully communicates both the genre and its unique gameplay hook.

• There’s a reason to act now - O’Leary applies light time pressure with the mention of the release date, which was just over a month away. That’s plenty of time to make a video, and YouTubers love to be early to highlight a game.

• A clear call-to-action - The next step is clear: hit reply and request a Steam key. O’Leary also includes the full link to his game’s Steam page instead of hiding it in hyperlinked text. That’s bait for YouTubers who are familiar with (and thus likely to trust) links using the store.steampowered.com URL structure.

It’s easy to overthink these things. I’ve seen hundreds of pitch emails for games, and the vast majority of devs tend to overwhelm the reader with detail: the backstory behind the studio, multi-paragraph descriptions of game systems, the deep lore behind the characters and world. None of this stuff is necessary. Any great game pitch should be able to fit in a tweet.

For marketing messages like this, there are really only two goals:

1. Persuade the other person you’ve got something they want

2. Make it extremely clear what they should do next to get it

That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. And O’Leary’s email nails it on both counts.

There’s another, more technical way of visualizing this, which is the classic marketing funnel.

In this case, the main text of the email is primarily pushing steps 1 and 2—awareness and interest. If the YouTuber clicks the Steam page link, and the trailer on that page is really good, you’ve successfully made it all the way through step 3: desire is sparked. Then, back to the email for step 4: take action by replying and requesting. At that point, O’Leary was free to follow up with a proper press kit and not just one Steam key, but multiple in case the streamer wanted to share with their community.

Whether or not the YouTuber actually posts a video from that point is out of your hands (though obviously it helps if the game is actually fun and makes for great content).

The point: When doing marketing comms, you can achieve your goals in far fewer words than you might expect, so long as you know what the other person needs and you have a clear idea about the next step you want them to take.

A little barrier can’t hurt

One more contrarian take: IMO it’s generally fine to not share Steam keys right away in cold emails to creators, because inviting them to request a key first opens up a chance to build a relationship.

I’ll share a personal example. Back when I led marketing at Odyssey Interactive, we put out an early trailer for one of our prototypes and followed it up with this tweet:

Over 500 content creators DMed in response to this post. In part, that was due to the strength of the reputation Odyssey built with its first game, Omega Strikers. But the principles behind the message mattered too: it was a concise, targeted message with a time-sensitive CTA and juicy assets to bait the hook.

The idea behind asking creators to DM me was premised on the belief that if we could talk to people directly, we could move past transactional “cold” conversations into something warmer. For every person that reached out, I replied with details about the preview event we were holding plus a link for a private Discord channel exclusively for creators. If people had questions or follow ups, we talked it out and joked around. I told people to bring a couple of friends to the preview event. And in the end, not everybody showed up, but many of those who did brought others, and the total attendee count in our Discord server the night of the playtest was slightly over 500.

If your hook is good enough, these things work themselves out.

That’s it for this week.

And speaking of clean CTAs:

It’s funny how easy it is to compress our lives down into simple stories.

Like when people ask what I did before my current job, I usually just say “I worked as a marketing guy in the video game industry for a decade, and before that I wrote about games for magazines.”

That summary omits some emotionally-charged personal lore.

For one, the magazines thing: I was obsessed with games magazines as a kid. Tips & Tricks was useful. Electronic Gaming Monthly was more mature and eclectic. Game Informer was polished and beautiful. But the real magic was in Nintendo Power, which was just as colorful and joyful as the games it promoted. Its writers and reviewers had real personality, and the magazine celebrated them by name. It even included a stack-ranked diagram to inform you about each reviewer’s preferred genres. I daydreamed: How cool would it be to review games for a living?

Around the time I got to high school, I decided it was time to grow up and read some real magazines. My journalism teacher was a classic 90s-style techno-libertarian who shared his copies of Wired Magazine with me. The writing in Wired was best-in-class, this teacher explained. He heaped particular praise on the feature stories, many of them written by “editor at large” Steven Levy. I studied those pieces like they were sacred texts. I wanted to write like Levy. And when I told my teacher about my ambitions to one day write for magazines, he said “if you ever write for Wired I’ll hang your picture on the wall.”

That gave me a north star to aim for, and his encouragement was fuel in my tank. Three years later, I got my first feature story published in Wired.

Okay, technically it was on Wired.com. But it sounds so much nicer if I compress the story down, doesn’t it? The point is, I learned how to write in large part by studying Wired feature stories, and the Wired house style for features is fundamentally Steven Levy’s DNA. He’s written far more features for the magazine than anyone else, with his first Wired piece appearing all the way back in Volume 1, Issue #2, in 1993.

Still, 32 years later, Levy is writing for Wired. He remains, at age 74, a fantastic writer. But last Friday he wrote a piece about Substack that I fervently disagree with. And I think the problem is that, like many who’ve invested years of their lives into the legacy media ecosystem, Levy has adopted an overly-compressed, simplified, and ultimately incorrect narrative about what Substack and other platforms like it (Ghost, Beehiiv, Patreon, Kit, etc.) actually are.1

The Old-School Sneaks In

Levy’s story (linked above) starts out with a rundown of all the former TV news hosts and newspaper journalists who’ve recently made the move to Substack: Terry Moran, Jennifer Rubin, Mehdi Hassan, Chuck Todd. You can check the Substack leaderboards for the U.S. History category to see a whole list of people like this. You’ve got 1960s-era TV legends like Dan Rather and social media age grifters like Shaun King, all on one platform.

After this intro, Levy quickly launches his attack:

You might be tempted to think that the Substack revolution is shaking up the foundations of journalism, agreeing with Substack star Emily Sundberg that newsroom leaders everywhere should be barring their doors to prevent further defections. Well, not so fast. The Substack model may work very well for a few, but it’s not so easy to march in and match a salary. Readers have to pay a high price for a voice that they once enjoyed in a publication they subscribe to. And writers have to get used to the idea that the breadth of their wisdom is limited to a small percentage of patrons. Is Substack sustainable for writers addressing a general audience?

This paragraph acts as the framing for the rest of the piece, and it fundamentally sucks as a starting point. Levy is right, of course, that very few who leave a full-time job and open up a Substack will immediately match their former salary. And the cost for readers is higher on a per-writer basis, yes. But the last two sentences are where he loses the thread.

First, what’s this about the wisdom of writers being “limited to a small percentage of patrons?” If Levy is referencing paywalls on Substack locking content off from free readers, he might be concerned to learn that this is what his own column looks like for non-paying Wired readers:

I’m being rude here. Obviously Levy knows that his newsletter is locked behind a paywall. But then why bring up paywalls as a criticism of Substack?

Regardless, the question he raises next is more revealing: Is Substack sustainable for writers addressing a general audience? I mean, the answer to this is very simply: No. A general audience? What? That’s not what Substack is. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the business model.

Substack is a platform that rewards writers who address extremely specific niches. Isn’t that obvious? Just look at the leaderboards for the top paid newsletters. The number one newsletter in the business category is a career advice blog for product managers at tech companies. One of the three biggest writers in the technology category is Alex Xu, who writes a highly technical blog about systems design for software engineers. The biggest Substack about U.S. politics is a digital news ‘zine specifically targeting center-right conservative types who are anti-woke (huge audience!) but also anti-Trump (uh-oh?) and basically classically liberal in outlook and which runs columns with headlines like My Husband Wants to Be Cremated. I’d Ignore His Dying Wish.

Who is the target demographic here? I dunno man, but it works on Substack. And that’s because, unlike in print magazines or their erstwhile dot-com successors, the most successful Substacks are not trying to serve a general audience. They’re fundamentally niche publications where highly qualified writers serve a targeted audience best-in-class content about a specific well-defined topic. And they often ship multiple times per week, or even daily. (One more case-in-point: the #9 best-selling culture newsletter is a hyper-focused feminist perspective newsletter about abortion called, somewhat threateningly, Abortion, Every Day.)

All of that is to say: Levy is asking the wrong question. But he’s not alone in this misunderstanding. Here he goes quoting another writer who’s equally confused:

Ana Marie Cox, who once enjoyed blogging fame as Wonkette, is even grimmer, writing in her newsletter that Substack “is as unstable as a SpaceX launch.” She wasn’t impressed with the more recent influx of name writers. “How many Terry Morans does Substack have room for?” she wrote. “Is there even a public appetite for a dozen Terry Morans, each independently Terry Moran-ing in his own newsletter?”

Cox is referring to subscription fatigue, which is something I think of every time a sign-up page pops up when opening a new Substack. Typically, Substack pros solicit a monthly fee of $5-10 or an annual rate of $50-150. Usually there’s a free tier of content, but journalists who hope to make at least part of their livelihood on Substack save the good stuff for paid customers. Compared to subscribing to full-fledged publications, this is a terrible value proposition. After leaving The Atlantic, celebrated writer Derek Thompson started a Substack that cost $80 a year—that’s one penny more than a digital subscription to the magazine he just left! (The Atlantic will probably spend $300,000 to replace him with someone else worth reading.) It doesn’t take too many of those subscriptions to match the cost of The New York Times, which probably has 100 journalists as good as Substack writers, and you get Wordle to boot.

We’ve got a few things to deal with here:

1. It’s extremely funny to randomly diss Ana Marie Cox as someone who “once enjoyed blogging fame.” That’s just a brutal left hook out of nowhere from Levy.

2. I’ll match Levy with a swing of my own: Cox’s quip that Substack is “as unstable as a SpaceX launch” is such a BlueSky-coded way of saying she hopes it fails. It’s a line that only makes sense if your brain has been totally melted by viewing everything through a lens distorted by politics and culture wars.

3. But the real banger line here is Levy’s own argument that “Compared to subscribing to full-fledged publications,” paying $80/year for a publication run by a single writer is “a terrible value proposition.”

This last one is what I want to focus on, because the math here is illustrative of the real difference between Substack and other subscription-powered legacy media outlets.

Remember that screenshot above showing how Steven Levy’s newsletter is hidden behind a paywall? Here’s what you see when you click that beautiful blue “GET DIGITAL ACCESS” button:

Wow! $1 per month for access. And after the first year it’s still only $30/year! That’s like, less than half of what you’d pay for an annual sub to a single premium Substack. What value! Time to click that “GET DIGITAL ACCESS” button for a second time. But wait, what’s this?

That first-year discount is pretty steep: $5/month total for seven different media outlets. Why is Wired corporate owner Condé Nast offering me such a big discount to subscribe to a bunch of completely unrelated publications? I mean, what does the actual Venn diagram look like between Wired subscribers and Vogue readers? I’m sure it’s not nothing but is there really that much of an overlap?

Ads World vs. Subs World

Here’s what’s actually happening:

Yes, Condé Nast would like to onboard a bunch of inattentive subscribers for cheap and then automatically renew them at $144/year. That’s part of this. But more than that, they’re pricing their first-year subscriptions low because they need to be able to tell advertisers that they’ll put their ads in front of a lot of eyeballs. Steven Levy’s newsletter does not pay for itself by generating subscription revenue. How could it? Each Wired subscriber is paying less than $3/month. Instead, the Condé Nast business model is built around charging corporate buyers high CPM rates for ad units which are displayed across Condé’s entire portfolio of brands. The more people viewing these publications—or passively subscribed to them—the more they can charge.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this business model,2 but Condé’s approach has fundamentally different economic incentives from something like Substack. If your primary business is “selling a ton of ad volume to corporate buyers,” you’re going to need to create content designed to reach a big, general audience.

That’s different from Substack. Because the primary revenue driver here is subscription-based, a solo writer can get by with a much smaller readership. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing something so niche that only a few thousand people care about it. If the work is good enough that you can convince 1,000 people to pay $8/month for it, you’re in business. Scale up from there to 2,000 subs, and you’re almost certainly getting paid better than the median Wired writer.3

This is really important: To make its business work The Atlantic needs hundreds of thousands of readers who may or may not care about their content. Derek Thompson only needs a few thousand people to really care about his abundance thing. These are totally different business models, with very different incentives.

Often, when writers for legacy media outlets write about Substack, they do this thing where they adopt an objective-sounding tone in order to appear authoritative. They bring in outside “experts” for quotes, and copiously link to other media commentators for backup. If you read between the lines in these pieces, you see that these writers are using the process of writing the article to work out for themselves what it would take for them to start a Substack. Levy is absolutely doing the same thing here. And he gives the game away when he slips in, parenthetically, that he has made a “conscious choice” to stick with Condé Nast. As he puts it:

You will note that this newsletter, and this writer, are delivered to you as part of a larger legacy media stack. That’s a conscious choice.

What calculations informed this choice? Levy doesn’t tell us. That’s somewhat understandable, as it would probably require sharing his current comp package at Wired, where Levy is almost certainly the highest-paid writer on staff (at least, I hope that’s the case). Again, the guy has been writing for this same magazine since before Doom released. The opportunity cost of leaving Wired and starting fresh with an “indie newsletter,” as he puts it, is gonna be way higher for Levy than it would be for any less tenured writer on staff.

A False Dichotomy

This is where I think we have to question Levy’s original framing: the idea that “time is running out” for anyone that wants to build a career on Substack. The argument hinges on the assumption that in order to be successful on Substack, you have to be a big hotshot who leaves a legacy media publication to go all-in as a solo writer.

In practice, there are a much wider variety of things happening on the platform:

• Writers like Katherine Dee freelance for legacy pubs and use those opportunities as a way to drive more awareness for owned channels

• Journalists who are happily committed to a big media brand like Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier operate a non-paid Substack to promote books and other side projects.

• Experienced media people who’ve successfully scaled a newsletter on Substack like Stephen Totilo are starting to bring in additional freelance writers to increase the output on their (formerly solo) publications.

• Before it was bought and gutted by Valnet, I had a deal with Polygon to syndicate some of the feature stories written here for Push to Talk. They offered to pay, but I turned them down because I just wanted the additional distribution and reach for my work.

The point is: there are new models and possible arrangements emerging. Writers no longer have to choose between a full-time stable job at a legacy publication and going for broke alone on Substack. Some go all in and make it work. Some treat Substack like another social channel, dipping their toes in and building up reach while keeping one or even two feet in a more traditional arrangement.

Substack doesn’t yet solve everything. Far from it, actually. The macro-environment sucks for most professional writers. But if you squint, you can see a new ecosystem evolving—one where scrappy writers are claiming freedom for themselves to capture more of the value they create. I strongly believe that part of this evolution will include the emergence of new outlets that can employ freelancers and help newer writers get started.

So there’s a false dichotomy that’s been presented to writers. And even if you accept the terms of that split, Levy admits, some of those solo Substack writers are worth paying for. Not that jerk Terry Moran, of course. “No way will I pay him,” Levy writes, before listing some writers he subscribes to:

I’ve already got ABC News on my cable, paid subscriptions to nearly a dozen publications and, yes, a bunch of Substack subs that I or my wife get billed for yearly or monthly. These include James Fallows, Jonathan Alter, Joyce Wadler, and Gregg Easterbrook, during the months he writes Tuesday Morning Quarterback.

Even though the price is high for one single voice, I find those writers worth the cost…

Nice! But wait. There’s one more sentence in this article, and it’s here that Levy slips in one little request—a poison pill revealing that his thinking about media is fundamentally stuck in 1993:

But I wish the legacy publications they once wrote for still employed them so I wouldn’t have to pay a la carte.

Oh my God. Yes. The problem with Substack is that you can just pay writers directly and they keep 87% of the money.4 This can’t stand. In fact, every time I get paid I think to myself I just wish that I could somehow cut a Condé Nast executive in on this. You know? I don’t feel right making a dollar unless at least half of it goes to some guy sitting in a New York City corner office.

How can anyone working in media read this and not pull their hair out? Levy just admitted that these writers are worth the cost. Now he wishes they’d give up some significant percentage of their revenue to a middleman “legacy publication” (his words, not mine!) just so the billing is cleaner?

I’m just gonna say it: Steven Levy ought to be able to start a paid Substack—or any side hustle he wants—while still keeping that Wired gig. If he did, thousands of people would doubtless decide that he’s worth $8/month, “subscription fatigue” be damned. I know I would. So why not do it? Does he think he needs Condé Nast to act as a mediator for all the words he publishes on this side of eternity? Or is it just fear holding him and many other legacy media writers like him back?

Maybe Levy has compressed his own story down into something too simple: Wired editor-at-large. That’s a good story. But he’s more than that.

To be clear, I don’t dismiss the “subscription fatigue” thing. I’m subscribed to too many Substacks as well, and I also feel like I’m hitting my limit on paid subs. But why is the only suggested solution here for writers to cut in some billion-dollar conglomerate on every subscription? That is hopelessly old-school thinking.

Here’s another idea: Substack could let readers opt into a cable-TV style approach to billing: Customize your subscription bundle with different packages and channels, and get billed one flat rate once per month. One subscription, with all the writers you truly want to hear from. That’s just one idea! I’m just throwing stuff out here. Surely, surely there are other solutions here that don’t involve dragging in the bloated, advertising-addicted corpses of a bunch of 20th century media companies.

In the meantime, writers have got to break out of this 20th century mode of thinking that you can only do one thing at a time. You ought to be able to try radical new ways of distributing your work and building up your own channels—even if doing so while still working for “the man.”

It’s time to ask for more.

That’s it for this week.

I’m gonna go unsubscribe from Bon Appétit.

When people see a piece of art, they bake the limitations of that medium into their expectations for it. Your brain settles itself into a mode where you can be wowed.
—Greg Maletic, Director of Special Projects at Panic

Panic, Inc. is such a weird company.

Originally formed in 1997 as a commercial software developer for the Mac, Panic pulled off an improbable expansion into indie game publishing in 2016 with the award-winning PC game Firewatch. The Portland-based company’s track record in the years since has been consistently brilliant, with critically acclaimed releases like Arco, Despelote, Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and the D.I.C.E. Awards Game of the Year winner Untitled Goose Game.

Panic also, somewhat infamously, made a handheld games console with a crank.

When I wrote about the Playdate a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by how vibrant its developer ecosystem seems to be. There are now hundreds of games available for the Playdate, despite the fact that nobody—neither the devs nor Panic—are likely making much money on the endeavor. But games keep coming out, and everybody seem like they're having a good time.

For a long time I've wanted to chat with somebody at Panic to ask a very basic question: What are you guys trying to do, exactly?

Fundamentally, it does not make obvious sense from a business perspective to pour this much time and effort into producing a tiny handheld gaming device with a black-and-white screen. And then, against all odds, they went and nurtured an entire dev ecosystem and facilitated the release of over 300 games? The whole thing’s baffling. What’s the goal?

This week, I finally got the chance to ask somebody who would know.

Greg Maletic is the Director of Special Projects at Panic and the overall project lead on the Playdate. He’s a guy who loves weird hardware, as should be obvious when he shows off his gigantic vintage calculator collection:

In our call, we discussed the origins of the Playdate, the hardest moments Maletic and his team faced when attempting to bring the device to market, and some hints of Panic's future plans for the platform.

What follows is a lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation.

PUSH TO TALK: Over the last few years, you guys have built up a lot of credibility in games, not just with the Playdate, but also by publishing titles like Untitled Goose Game, ARCO, and Firewatch. I love the Playdate, but it really is such a weird and inexplicable thing. What's the vision for it—why make something like this?

GREG MALETIC: Yeah, it's all extremely weird, but we're doing it anyway. We started a long time ago on Playdate. I think we first started thinking about it maybe in 2012. And we just kind of had rough ideas. At that point, the company was turning 15 years old, and I think the founders [Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser] wanted to do something to commemorate the 15th anniversary. So we thought about various things to do, and one of the things that stuck was, let's do a hardware project for the first time ever.

We had only done software before this. So we started brainstorming ideas. Should it be an alarm clock? A calculator? What should it be? Eventually we thought about the Game & Watch, the old Nintendo handheld from the 80s, with those LCD displays. That sounded super fun, so Cabel found the screen [a monochrome Memory LCD screen manufactured by Sharp, which the Playdate now uses] as a result of that, because the screen looked very much like an old Game & Watch display.

We had exactly one guy in the office, Dave Hayden, that knew about hardware, so we sent him on a project to try and make a game console. He spent about a year mocking it up, and he eventually got there. He had something that actually ran a game, and we were like, okay, this is really cool, actually. And so we kind of like slowly staffed up on it as it became more and more real.

We had this idea: What if we sent out this game to people, but then when you get the device and play it, it sort of magically changes into another game a week later. That's where the idea for Season One1 originated. But another inspiration for the season was that we honestly thought nobody was going to write a game for it.

We really thought it was going to be zero games. There are so many Kickstarter-like things you see where they put up the project and they're like, “we can't wait to see what you all do with it.” But that doesn’t always work. So we were like, well, we have to deliver something. So that was the inspiration for season one. If you would have told me that there’d be 1,300 Playdate games on Itch right now and 300 games in our catalog, I’d have never believed you.

It is really hard to build a game developer ecosystem. Why do you think it’s working?

I think it’s that we're just super dedicated to it. We love all these people that have written their first video games on the platform, and we love all the people that seem to get joy out of playing it. It’s really intoxicating and it keeps us going.

The owners [at Panic] are just committed to making it a thing. We never thought we were ever gonna work on a video game console in our lives. That just didn't seem like that was in our future when we started this. And it has just been really fun to do.

I mean… but let me put a caveat there. It's been incredibly hard to do also. It’s been an insane amount of work and there have been plenty of moments where it hasn't been fun at all. But as we look back on it and look at where we're going it feels like a success, even beyond what we expected.

I'd love to hear more about the hard moments. I mean, I know about the crazy pallet theft—the Vegas caper [Editor’s note: a $400,000 shipment of Playdates was stolen and then recovered after Fed-Ex delivered the cargo to the wrong address]. Other than that, what’s been the toughest?

Yeah, there's been a lot of things that have been tricky. I mean, one, it's a fairly difficult device to manufacture. Teenage Engineering came up with the industrial design for it. It was beautiful and we wholeheartedly went for it. But it's also very precise, it's very small, it's thin. It took some effort to get all that stuff crammed in there, and to get the crank to work properly and reliably. There have been a lot of moments where we go, why isn't this working? How do you build 90,000 of these things?

We also had problems getting parts during COVID, because we were obviously buying at a relatively small volume compared to other people. And so it was difficult for us to get parts in a reasonable time frame sometimes. We were using this custom CPU, the STM32F7.

They were crushing it with the branding on that one.

Yeah. That was our CPU and that was fine. But then once COVID hit, we were told there was now a two-and-a-half-year wait to get any more. So we thought we were going to have to stop building the Playdate for two and a half years.

So we ended up switching to another CPU. It's a STM32H7. And yeah, they're compatible, but in fact there are lots of little differences, performance differences we have to account for. We didn't want to change the performance of the device at that point. The new CPU is a little faster.

That was after you'd already made a bunch of the units?

Yeah, we'd already shipped, I think, 40,000 of them.

Oh my God.

And so we had to go to a new architecture just as were getting started basically. That took, I don't know, six months of engineering effort to make it happen. Six months of basically accomplishing nothing.

Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare. I wanna go back to what you said about not wanting to make the CPU faster. If you follow conversations in the Playdate community, one topic that comes up is the question: “What would they do with the Playdate 2?” That seems to me to maybe be missing the point. It's not like you guys are trying to push the limits of technology, right? I assume you wouldn’t want a 4x faster CPU. But I am curious: If there ever was a Playdate 2, how you would think about approaching it?

Yeah, there are no plans currently for anything like that, but I agree with your general premise. Like, Playdate 2, were it to ever happen… honestly I shouldn't even use that premise. [Laughs.] There's nothing like that happening.

It's supposed to be very limited and very easy to write for. That's the whole idea. And we use those constraints as a way to make it easy to develop for and fun to develop for. Anything we'd want to do would be to try and make something that was kind of, you know, even closer to its roots. You know, something that's more like a Playdate than even the first Playdate. So I'll just agree with your basic premise that we wouldn’t make a souped-up version of a Playdate.

One thing we wanted to do was make this thing not like your phone. If it gets too close to your phone, it loses its rationale for existence. So that was one reason we added physical controls, why we added a crank, and why we did the weird screen.

There’s this guy who made an ebook reader app for the Playdate. And there’s something tantalizing about it. I liked the experience of using it more than I thought I would—it was almost viable as a pocket ebook device, right? You know what I mean? It was almost there. This is something kind of striking about the Playdate. It's serving this completely unique use case, and it makes you wonder: What are all the other imaginary hardware devices we never got?

Yes. Like, I love my iPhone—I think it’s probably the best thing that's ever been invented. But as it also has flattened our world into one thing. And when I was a kid, there were just like a billion different cool consumer electronics things out there that you would buy and admire and they were all very beautifully designed. And now everything is an app, and that's great but it also kind of sucks at the same time. So yeah, Playdate is a bit of a reaction against that.

I can see how the ebook reader app works on Playdate. I mean, it's a very private and personal device. It doesn't have notifications and things like that. When you're on your Playdate, it feels like it's just you and your Playdate and really nobody else, which is similar to a book.

Are you gonna go back to the well on hardware at some point? Or, are there other hardware devices that you kind of wish existed that don't yet?

That is a great question. I'm not really prepared to answer it. In terms of what Panic's doing, we don’t have any plans like that… but I always fantasize about cool devices. I'm pretty old. I was born in 1968 and in the 70s there were a lot of great handheld electronic games. Well—they weren't great, they were okay. But they were wonderful to hold and acquire and use and every one of them was just wildly different. They didn't have to be compatible with each other. Each one was like an experiment unto its own.

And so I do have fantasies about making a handheld, single-purpose game that reminds me of those games from the 70s. I wish there was more of a market for that kind of thing.

Let me switch gears and ask this: I noticed a progression between the Season One and Season Two games on Playdate. Many of the S1 games were weird and quirky—mostly showing off what the device can do. But the S2 games seem to be more about pushing the limitations of the device. And so the natural question then is like, well, what would a Season Three look like? What else would you want to see developers do with this thing?

I think the fact that Season Two games feel a notch more refined is reflective of where the developer community is right now. It wasn't a conscious effort that we were trying to pick games like that—that's just what's happening right now organically. The devs all see what others are doing and they're all trying to kind of one-up what the last game did. So yeah, Season Two is a reflection of that and my goals for Season Three—were there to be such a thing—would be for people to make stuff that makes you go: “Wow, I didn’t know I could do that on a Playdate.”

There's something weird about people… When people see a piece of art, they bake the limitations of that medium into their expectations for it. Your brain settles itself into a mode where you can be wowed.

I'm a big Disneyland fan. And on Main Street they have these very beautiful window displays, with these elaborate sort of mechanical tellings of Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty. And they're just incredibly beautifully done and wildly elaborate. They're not as elaborate as the Haunted Mansion, for example, but because it’s a window display and it's all mechanical, your brain sets itself into a mode where you’re able to be wowed by it.

I think people do that with Playdate too. You see some amazing black-and-white animation running at 50 frames a second, and you’re like oh my god, that looks amazing. Objectively it doesn't look as amazing as what you see on your PS5 every day. But because you know what a Playdate is, your expectations of what it's capable of are baked into your head a little bit, and you're able to judge against what the device is capable of, and then judge it as amazing.

I totally agree. Going back to your point about the seasons, one thing I noticed when I interviewed the Season Two developers was how excited they were to be featured. It was an honor to be included in the bundle, right? And it motivated them to finish when they maybe wouldn't have otherwise. So I do hope you guys keep doing those.

Yeah, Season Two has done really well and people have been really happy with it, so it does motivate us to say, This is actually a thing. Season One was sort of a weird thing where it was bundled for free with your Playdate, and all the games were built before the thing launched. There were some really great games in there. But Season Two was different. We were like, “Are people gonna buy this?”

And people have been buying it, so it’s been a very good experience for the product and for us and for the community.

I think you guys are getting really good at publishing. Like, Big Walk is coming out under Panic’s label, and it makes perfect sense. It feels like a Panic game. So I wondered, is there a larger strategy y'all have there that connects the Playdate to your other publishing efforts… other than “let's keep publishing cool shit?”

Because it does seem, and no offense [laughs], it seems like the strategy is just “let's publish cool shit.”

That is kind of the strategy, I think. On the publishing side, I keep a close eye on that stuff but I'm not directly involved with it. But we have an idea of what a Panic Game is. There’s a distinctive look and a distinctive sense of humor. So that's worked out really well.

But it’s not part of some mega-strategy with Playdate. Playdate is its own thing, and the game publishing is its own thing, except for the fact that Untitled Goose Game really helped us make Playdate. The revenue from that kept Playdate going during its development years.

It seems like it's getting harder and harder to have repeatable successes as a publisher. There's no reliable place where you can put in dollars and get players out. So how do you think about building advantages for yourselves as publishers?

Yeah. Maybe this is dumb advice, but I think you need a hook. And the reason I say that is that one of the biggest and most surprising successes for us on the Playdate has been Root Bear. I assume you're familiar with it.

It’s a fantastic game.

When we go to shows and we put Playdates out for people to try them out, that's what we have running on there because people just respond to it like crazy. It's so visceral. They just love it.

I don't want to reduce the industry to saying you need novelty, because that's too reductive. But you need something that really pops and catches people’s attention. Like, you know, this Pixar movie Elio came out this past weekend, and I'm sure it's a good movie. They don't make anything bad.

Yeah.

But I recall seeing the trailers months ago and just nothing about it really stuck with me. It just didn't have a hook and if you're not going to be licensing Minecraft or whatever, you need something for people to hang their hats on and remember.

And I guess Playdate… it’s this weird yellow thing and it has this crank on the side and people remember that. I say that like it's some gigantic success… It is a big success in its small little world. People know what it is even if they don't have one.

Is there anything you’re willing to say about what you’re doing next?

This is not breaking news, but one thing we're going to try and do over the next year or so is grow outside of the Panic bubble. We feel like we've sold Playdates to everybody that knew about us. And now we need to sell to people who have never heard of Panic before. Based on the reactions I see from people when they try a play date, there are a lot of people out there that would like one, but that don't have one. So our goal over the next year is to try and kind of grow the Playdate universe.

Awesome. Thanks for your time, Greg.

You’ve probably seen the reporting on the astonishing popularity of Grow A Garden. It’s a massive hit, often with more concurrent players than the entirety of the top 10 games on Steam combined. Crazy!

But if you look at screenshots or videos of the game, there’s something else you may have noticed about Grow A Garden. It’s something most of the press has been too polite to point out.

I’m just gonna say it: The game looks like butt cheeks.

To be fair, it’s a Roblox game made by a teenager, and those all sort of look like this: weird fonts and garish colors. Modern game devs put so much effort into UX design and high-fidelity visuals. Isn’t it kind of interesting that weak “graphics,” and really the lack of any art direction at all, just doesn’t seem to matter for games like Grow A Garden? The kids playing it simply don’t care.

I’m not exactly a graphics purist myself. It’s long been a source of minor embarrassment for me that, despite working on PC games for a decade, I’ve never owned a truly top of the line gaming PC. The idea of dropping $1,000+ on a rig always seemed like overkill, especially when I was working on League of Legends, which can run at 30 FPS on a toaster.1 Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen PUBG and Apex Legends on max settings, and I led global comms on those games. My old, beat-up ROG laptop ran the games at a decent framerate, and they looked good enough to me on “medium” settings.

But recently curiosity got the best of me and I decided to go all-in on a big rig: an Alienware Aurora pre-built machine with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 card. After first booting up the beast, I spent some time installing a bunch of games and cranking all the settings to the max. Expedition 33 looks incredible on it, as does the Resident Evil 4 remake and the new Doom game. But when you’re actually playing these games, you’re usually too busy to notice the high-end graphical features like reflections in the water or more luscious shrubs.

Still, I was excited to show off my new toy to my oldest son, who’s almost five. I sat down with him and we started installing a bunch of stuff included in PC Game Pass.

The first thing he wanted to play? The new PAW Patrol game. It’s a cute and well-made kids game, but doesn’t exactly push the limits of technical possibility.

We were stuck on PAW Patrol for a few sessions, and after the boy finally got tired of it I convinced him to check out some games that might actually require a graphics card. RoadCraft on Steam piqued his interest first. Like most four-year-old boys, he’s a big fan of large trucks and construction equipment. But RoadCraft was a bit complicated, and he wasn’t into the missions.

“This game is boring,” he said after about 20 minutes.

Back to Game Pass. We switched over to Firefighting Simulator - The Squad, which had him absolutely stoked at first. But it’s also not really a game for kids: it’s slow-paced and more concerned with realism than accessibility.

So we tried a few more Game Pass titles. Spray Paint Simulator was particularly fun for a bit. But soon he got tired of that too, and he asked if we could go back to playing Pikmin on the Nintendo Switch. Not Pikmin 4, mind you, but the very first Pikmin game that came out 24 years ago on the Gamecube. It was ported to the Switch recently with widescreen support and some light resolution improvements. Otherwise it looks more or less like it did back in 2001.

The textures are a little muddy, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on with all the Pikmin on-screen, but my boy doesn’t care. He laughs at the little grunts and squeals the Pikmin make when they’re carrying something heavy, and he’s devastated whenever a big monster gobbles up one of his little soldiers. He loves this game.

With the never-ending popularity of Minecraft and Roblox among kids, it’s hard not to notice that some of the most popular games in the world today are more than a decade old.

This would have been unthinkable in the ‘90s or 2000s. The tech was improving too quickly. You’d walk into a Best Buy and see groups of dudes gathered around a demo station, gawking at whatever hot new game was coming out. Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 looks primitive today, but it was a head-turner in 2005.

When Heavenly Sword came out for the Playstation 3 in 2007, people literally could not believe how good it looked. My local GameStop kept the demo display running for a full year, and for good reason: the visual splendor was really the point of the new machines. You bought a PS3 because you wanted to play the new thing, and the new thing was obviously, objectively better than the old thing. Anyone with eyes could see.

It was a pattern that repeated every console cycle. New games were presumed, as a matter of course, to be better than old games.

With the latest console generation, that old presumption no longer holds. And sure, part of the reason is that, as many others have noted recently, new games don’t look that much better than the old games.

But the other reason is that a huge percentage of the audience just stopped caring. The 2.5 million kids playing Grow A Garden as I write this don’t care that it looks like it was designed in Microsoft Paint. It’s a fun game, it looks good enough for what it is, and it runs well on a tablet: that’s the bar.

I can feel my own tastes changing as well. I find myself more and more drawn toward games with stranger, older visual styles. It hit me hard while playing Lunacid recently that this looks really good. That’s a game that’s visually “outdated” on purpose, but the result is beautiful.

And when I watch my son playing Pikmin, I find myself appreciating it more. The team that made it was going for a much more realistic look than almost any other Nintendo game from that era, and they were naturally constrained by the limits of the platform. I remember first playing it 24 years ago and feeling a little annoyed by the ways it fell short of “real life.” I could imagine a version of the game that looked better, and tried to look past the ways it failed to live up to that vision.

A quarter century later, I look at my son’s beaming face as he plays Pikmin, and the game’s supposed flaws don’t stand out so much.

There’s something beautiful in that.

That’s it for this week.

I’m gonna go play PAW Patrol with an uncapped framerate on an 8K monitor.

Games are a very commercialized art form. They’re a bit like movies, where half the conversation is always about the budget and the box office earnings.

Partly this is because games are very expensive and time-consuming to create. Successful releases can also make a lot of money, so both audiences and game developers have become a bit obsessed with the business of games. Sales figures, concurrent player counts, that sort of thing. You often see people lamenting this focus on games as a commercial product. And I get it. Hell, I’m a marketing guy, and even I get tired of all the online chatter about metrics, peak CCU counts, and ever-bigger budgets and launch day records.

So it came as a nice surprise that the people at Panic went out and funded an entire new season of games for the Playdate, their little yellow handheld console with a crank. In an industry where everything is always bigger, the Playdate—with its 2.7-inch, 400x240 black-and-white screen—is the one place left where everything is smaller on purpose.

When I wrote about the Playdate’s growing catalog of games last year, I’d noticed a trend of developers going as small as possible with their games, in some cases creating amazing work using under 100 KB of disk space (see: Oom, Omaze, and YOYOZO). But something new and unexpected is going on with the officially supported slates of games releasing as part of Playdate’s ongoing Season Two schedule, which consists of 12 games delivered over six weeks as part of a single $39 bundle.

The devs are pushing the little handheld to its limits.

An Indie Legend Goes Playdate-Exclusive for Game #3

I first noticed this when digging into Fulcrum Defender, the new game from Faster Than Light and Into the Breach creators Subset Games. There’s just a lot packed into this game: lots of weapons, enemies, upgrades. It’s a very well fleshed out shoot-em-up. And while it’s small by the standards of Subset’s previous releases, you can tell that the team wanted to make something that feels complete in its own right.

Subset cofounder Jay Ma, who took the lead on Fulcrum Defender, told me she didn't set out to push the limits of the system, “but when you're making a game with lots of objects I naturally just wanna see how many you can get on the screen.”

Alas, the Playdate does have its limits, and at later stages of FD, with enemies swarming, you do encounter a bit of slowdown. “I definitely hit that wall pretty early,” Ma says, “but someone who was more familiar with how to write efficient code would certainly have gotten more out of the system. If I had no limitations, I probably would have made the endgame even more chaotic. Picture more cascading and interactive elements—shots splitting, bouncing, pushing enemies, etc.”

But the limitations inherent to the Playdate aren’t to be seen as a negative. “It helped me maintain focus on what was important,” she says, “and I learned a lot in the process of trying to optimize.”

Sidebar: A Q&A with Jay Ma of Subset Games

Faster Than Light and Into the Breach are two of the most beloved indie games of the past 15 years, so it’s a little shocking that the third release from the studio would roll out exclusively on the Playdate. I asked Jay Ma a few additional questions about the attraction and limitations of the device:

PUSH TO TALK: I really love how Fulcrum Defender demands precision, and the way it forces you to fully attend to every pixel on the screen. In some ways I think that sucks you in more completely and makes you forget you're playing on a 2.7-inch screen. I'm curious about the role precision plays in your work more broadly, and why you think it matters?

JAY MA: As a designer, the precision and kinesthetic joy of using the Playdate’s crank was what drew me to try and make a game for the device. What happens on screen when you move a mouse depends on all sorts of settings, so an input device with more accuracy than a joystick was very exciting for me.

I suppose this desire for precision and clarity extends to all our work. We want to make interesting challenges for the player when they have a full understanding of the game state. We do that by trying to be as transparent and clear with information as possible. This can be seen in the telegraphed attacks of enemies in Into the Breach and our attempt to show all game information in a single game screen in Faster Than Light.

Both prior Subset games had massive audiences. So I'm curious about how you think about the appeal for a designer of going smaller, and making something for a niche like the Playdate audience. How does that impact your design approach, and does it feel any different once the game is out in the world?

The process of developing the games is pretty similar—we start with the idea for an experience or mental state we want the player to be in, then generally work backwards to figure out game mechanics that would best achieve that goal. However, there are a lot of practical differences with developing for a small user base and a single device. You don't have to worry about the myriad types of computers out there, so testing is a lot simpler for example. All in all, the release process feels like a toned down version of releasing a full game—same type of excitement, anxiety, and post-release sadness—it's just not as strong and fades quicker. Frankly I hope I get to make more small games in the future. It's much easier on my nerves.

In general, we make games "selfishly." We try to create games that we ourselves would want to play, with the assumption that there's at least a few people out there who would enjoy it as well. We certainly add features and polish with the player in mind, but other than that I feel like I would want to make the same games even if they were never to be released. Frankly, I find the sheer number of fans of our games to be hard to mentally process. I struggle to picture numbers of people greater than 100, so having a million players enjoy the game or 10 thousand feels similarly positive—they're both abstract ideas I can't picture. I get to try to make games for me and my friends so everything else is just icing on the cake.

The Beauty of Limitations in The Whiteout

Another remarkably deep Season Two game is Steve Chipman’s The Whiteout, a sort of post-apocalyptic walking adventure inspired by The Road. It’s a surprisingly dark game, with a lot of death and horrifying moments. I’m usually not a fan of these sorts of slower-paced adventure games, but something about The Whiteout pulled me in, and I lost a couple of hours to it this week.

Chipman, who has released 10 games on the Playdate, told me in an email that he just loves “the problem-solving aspect” of game development. “I love that it lets me do all the things I really enjoy: solving hard problems and making art and music,” Chipman says. “Writing games for limiting platforms is a lot of fun too—I used to write games in JavaScript for fun way back in the Internet Explorer/Netscape days, long before JavaScript was ubiquitous, and the really enjoyable part of that was making the browser do something it wasn't meant to do.”

I asked Chipman whether he explicitly set out to make a “big” Playdate game with The Whiteout. His full response:

Absolutely. When I originally pitched the game, I said something along the lines of how one of my goals with it was to inspire other developers with what's possible on the device, in terms of breadth, visuals and storytelling. I hope I succeeded in that…

The limitations [of the Playdate] are a huge part of the appeal for me. I find it really fun to make something that looks really cool, try that really cool thing on the hardware, see that it absolutely tanks performance and then having to figure out how to optimize it so it doesn't. It's extremely satisfying. Finally getting a performant implementation of falling snow in a game about snow was a cause for celebration.

I've learned a lot about what makes for effective pixel art, as well as working at a small scale and little tricks to add details to things without muddying them or making them difficult to distinguish. Unique to 1-bit, there are things like dither flash and how to avoid it. Or finding a color palette I could use for art in The Whiteout that would dither to patterns that wouldn't flash as they passed through the transparent parts of the vignette, etc. You don't really have to consider things like that in an iPhone game, so it's a pretty unique set of challenges.

—Steve Chipman, founder of Scenic Route Software

Go Big, Get Nuts

One of my favorite Playdate games is Gravity Express (2023) by Nino van Hooff. It was one of the early “big” games on the Playdate’s Catalog storefront, with lots of levels and replayability. So it’s fitting that one of the most satisfying and rich games in the Playdate Season Two lineup comes from van Hooff, in collaboration with illustrator and musician Julie Bjørnskov.1

According to van Hooff, the duo had already made progress on what became Wheelsprung when they received an offer to pitch for Playdate Season Two. They were also feeling ambitious, and were aiming to build something that pushed the Playdate to its limits. “It's more that I'm drawn to doing big projects rather than Season Two inspiring me to make it bigger,” van Hooff says.

The collaboration between van Hooff and Bjørnskov is a testament to the community Panic has built up around the Playdate. The two connected via the official Playdate Discord, and they still haven’t met in person, despite recently shipping their game together.

Both developers sang the praises of the broader Playdate dev ecosystem: “I think the Playdate Discord is a lovely community where my games have been really well received,” Bjørnskov says.

“The community is great, consisting of 30-somethings with a positive attitude,” van Hooff agrees. “I have great FOMO anytime Panic or the community organize in-person events such as a BBQ or garage sale.”

“It’s impressive how much Nino was able to get out of the Playdate,” Bjørnskov says. “I can’t quite remember how many levels we originally planned, but it ended up being quite a few more. I still have a lot of ideas and things I’d like to explore—especially in terms of new levels and the visual worlds players move through. But, I think we managed to cover a lot of ground, and the levels that are included have a good flow—both in terms of difficulty and the evolving artwork.”

The Art of Developing a Scene

A striking thing about the Playdate, as it enters its fourth year on the market, is how unusually rich the dev scene around the platform has become, despite the relatively limited reach of the platform itself. It’s been a little over a year since Panic confirmed they’d sold 70,000 units of the device, and although they recently announced that they’ve paid out just over $1 million to developers on the platform, that’s spread out across over 250 releases… so nobody is really in this for the money.

But still, it’s getting a lot harder to write off the Playdate. It’s not just some zany marketing stunt pulled by a bunch of quirky creatives in Portland. This is a real platform, with hundreds of developers putting serious effort into releases.

I think there’s a temptation, especially given that the device costs $229, to dismiss the Playdate as a mere toy. It’s easy to see why: It’s got a crank controller! And Panic’s own messaging is hardly self-serious. “We made Playdate just for fun,” they declare on the official website.

So sure, it’s fun. But Panic certainly seems to be putting a lot of work in on this thing. They’ve built up a dedicated community of developers, released hundreds of games, and have now stewarded multiple “seasons” of content for an audience that, while small, seems genuinely engaged and excited about whatever the company does next.

Given all that, it may be time for a critical reassessment of what Panic is building here. Slowly, gradually, the Playdate has evolved into something more like a large-scale, collaborative, physical version of UFO 50. It’s an alternate history Game Boy with dozens upon dozens of genuinely great games.

Panic has achieved something much bigger than they’re normally credited for—even if, by traditional industry yardsticks, the Playdate remains “small.”

That’s it for this week.

I’m gonna go stretch out a wiener dog.