Everything on Nothing
Welcome to the podcast where everything is connected and nothing really matters. Hosted by Mickey, Christian, and Jacki
Everything on Nothing
Everything on ESports
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Esports has UNIFORMS?! In this Everything on Nothing field trip, Mickey chucks the teacher hat at Christian, who drags us from single‑celled organisms trying to win lunch all the way to five kids in matching jerseys, approved footwear, and sponsor logos beaming out on a jumbotron.
We talk:
- Bacteria as the first little freaks chasing “high score” by eating each other.
- Ancient board games and ball courts inventing rules, winners, and losers long before Wi‑Fi.
- Spacewar, Tennis for Two, and the era of “please don’t sneeze on the mainframe while we chase dots.”
- High scores in arcades turning quarters into personality tests.
- The Atari crash, ET in the desert, and everyone deciding video games were over.
- Nintendo showing up with Mario like, “No, we’re actually doing this for real.”
- Arcades teaching us that competition = attention = more tokens.
- Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat turning “I’m better than you” into a public blood sport.
- Quake LANs: shirtless guys, tangled cables, Texas ballrooms, zero fire code vibes.
- Korean StarCraft as full‑on TV event: casters screaming, bug armies, national heroes in headsets.
- One weird custom map that mutates into Dota, then Dota 2 and League, then “oh cool, this is our whole economy now.”
- The glow‑up from “free sponsor T‑shirt” to actual matching jerseys.
- Tournament dress codes quietly inventing the esports “look.”
- The shoe rules: no Crocs, no open toes, no tripping and suing the publisher.
- Why organizers hate rogue hoodies with mystery logos.
- How uniforms make teams feel like real sports instead of “five guys sharing a Discord.”
- League of Legends printing money off skins like it’s a side hustle from god.
- That skin money bankrolling giant stages, lights, and the jerseys hanging in your closet.
- Live‑service games locking your library behind server vibes and trust.
- Christian’s verdict: we’ve crossed from “inspired chaos” to “corporate coked‑up decision‑making.”
By the end, “Esports has UNIFORMS?!” stops being a punchline and turns into a whole messy story about how competition, TV, and capitalism stitched together those jerseys—and why somewhere, a very serious man is still updating the rulebook to make sure no one wins a championship in beachwear and Crocs.
League of Legends caster Max Atlas Anderson said They said Busan was the church of Chovi, but what is a god to five non-believers? Welcome to Everything on Nothing, where everything is connected and nothing really matters. I'm your guide, Mickey, and if you ask me a question, I will answer it thoroughly. Um joining me is my life partner and producer, Jackie. That's me. And our partner in crime and master of graphic design, Christian. Howdy, y'all. Uh today we're going to do something a little bit different. Uh we have a topic that I am not well versed on. So we're going to hand the reins over to Christian when we get there. But before we do that, uh we're coming uh to the listener, it might not seem like uh a big break, but we are coming back from a like two-week break because we had a lot of life changes going on. So yeah, uh we'll we'll check in. Uh, how you doing, Christian? How's the new uh position?
SPEAKER_04It's uh, I mean, it's it's exciting. Uh it's one of those things where I guess I'm coming on at like a pretty hectic time, but I'm not feeling any of that because I'm just a baby there. So, you know, like you you the only real stress is you're looking around and going, like, boy, I sure feel useless here. Uh, but I'm doing what I can to help them out, and people are like, hey, you know, you're helping us out. So that they're so far, it's it seems like very chill, very nice. Uh it's a bit of a commute, but I kinda knew that going in. So I'm not mad at it. I signed up for it.
SPEAKER_00That's the kind of I mean, it's a double-edged sword in that when they if they're in upheaval uh expansion or or what have you, and you're joining them, and at the end of that, like this is the most chaotic you're gonna face. So at the end of it, it's like, oh, okay, cool. But also with that chaos, everyone's so busy that they don't have time to hold your hand. Like, if you join during a slow period, then you always have someone that's bored and they need something to do, so they'll guide you carefully and tip tiptoe through the tulips. Uh, if we're gonna use a uh outsider music reference. So um, so you know, again, but once you get through this, there's a lot of information flowing around, and you know, our experience being around you, you're a smart guy, you're gonna pick up on a lot of you have your antenna up, so you're gonna pick up a lot of those noisy signals and basically be able to filter through.
SPEAKER_04So I mean it's so funny. This is just the mic for this headset, which I'm not using because it's physically, and it's been like three episodes, I think we've recorded with me using this setup, and I'm it's just funny that finally someone is like, basically, what the fuck is that on your head, child?
SPEAKER_00Uh Jackie, you're also in a little bit of flux, aren't you?
SPEAKER_01I'm not really in flux. I went on an adventure uh to Canton, Ohio, which is a city that I had never even heard of before like two months ago. And now I am like, I want to go back. I had a fucking great time. Uh the thing I want to go back for is very specific. Uh I got to tour the factory of terror and the Ohio Christmas Factory, which is like uh short time like this, just open at Halloween and Christmas time. But they're like indoor Halloween horror nights. Uh, it's the largest indoor haunt in the country. And the haunt is, you know, fine. I've done Halloween horror nights, but the Christmas factory got me so excited. It was like one of the most magical places I've ever been to, and it wasn't even like all the way done up yet because they were obviously in flux. I got like a behind-the-scenes tour, but it's uh cool as hell. They're really thoughtful. There's like multiple bars, dance floors, little like a full-on gingerbread house that you can walk through. Um, like photo ops. They're really intentional about making sure that people of all ages will have a good time. People of all, they have like a uh sensory overload area for the people that you know don't want all the sparkly lights and Christmas music all the time. Uh, it just looks like such a cool place, and it's indoors, and I'm sure like in the middle of winter, it's so hard for families to find something to do indoors outside of the weather in Ohio. So it just makes me happy that it exists, and I kind of want to go back. But also, I had the best hot dog of my life and some really good pizza and some other good food too.
SPEAKER_00And I can I just imagining myself crumbling in the corner, like too much Christmas, too much Christmas.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you would have been over in the sensory area for sure, but it was cool. The sensory area was nice, it was nice.
SPEAKER_00Um, I started a new position. I am now teaching at a college, and uh, there's the good days and bad days, there's good students and other people there.
SPEAKER_01So I I will say from an outsider perspective, not going to the work every day, you seem much less stressed at home and much more like interested in what you're doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Um, I I think after like going through some of the classes, uh, I think by this time next year, it'll just be uh an easy flow. Right now, I'm trying to figure it out how to basically because I'm the type of person that'll like dump all the information and then make sure everyone understands it and the way I treat other people when I'm giving them information. It's like I have five hours of information and uh we've only used an hour and 15. Uh now what? Uh, because I don't want to get too far ahead because they're the the homework is already set up and assigned and all that stuff. And it's like if I go too far ahead, then it's not gonna match up with the book, but I don't want to sit here for three hours and not do anything. But you know, uh I've gotten a couple compliments, and I've also gotten a couple people that are very angry with me because I kind of stick to the rules.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's that's a problem with them, not you. They they don't like it's in my brain, they're the people that don't like to be held accountable for things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I it's it's um part of the part of the curriculum is based on ours in the chair, and like they knew that sign in signed up for it, and I tried to do research on how to better keep them in the classroom and all that stuff, and every everything I found from this generation is just get up and walk out. That's okay. They don't have any, they can't do anything to you, and I'm like I I understand where they're coming from in that kind of aspect, but like coming from the military background of sit in the chair and do not move until you are released, and then once you are released, uh you have 10 minutes to get back. You have you know, run outside, smoke your cigarette, come back. Uh, because everyone smoked because that was the only social activity we had in between classes. Um, but yeah, everyone was back in their seat before you know the the break was over, and then right back in. And also the the the amount of information they gave us came faster and much more. So it's kind of like trying to find a right pace that I don't fry out, you know. Everyone that was in the program that I was in had to go through several tests to get there. Uh, the program I'm teaching, it's like whoever signs up can you know take it as long as they do their prerequisites and all this other stuff. So it's like I don't want to fry uh people's brains by trying to teach them too fast, but then I also have people that I can see it in their eyes, and I'm teaching them too slow, and I'm like, I get it. I know, I know.
SPEAKER_01Is there any way that you could do it the way that the social circle school system was set up where you do a pretest and the people that pass the pretest can go on and do independent study while you teach the people who do not know the information yet?
SPEAKER_00I'm not, I haven't been at the call it a company for lack of better terms. As soon as I learn the inner workings of the company, then I'll be able to figure stuff like that out. But coming in the door going, this is a better way to do it without knowing, yeah, you know, knowing all the uh requirements and regulations and laws that they're they have to follow and and stick with. So uh so there's that.
SPEAKER_01I also want to mention that I went to see I Love Boosters, and that is dangerously close to becoming my entire personality at the moment. Like I have listened to nothing but the soundtrack uh every free time I get to listen to music, uh except for when I'm sleeping. And uh I made Mickey watch like a short behind the scenes of it, and if it was streaming, I would watch it probably at least once a day. It was so fucking good.
SPEAKER_04I would have a single frame of that, and I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go see what this is. I still haven't, but I will, it's on the list.
SPEAKER_00I would say if you have a uh any anti-capitalist feels in your bones or any kind of uh rebellious streak in your nervous system, uh go on any uh any musical outlet and find the coop C O U P uh from Boots Riley and just play it and it it will uh resonate with your soul. Uh he's just he is what through and through very anti uh everything. And yeah, like I I think uh the the one with Adam Driver uh about the clans black clansman. Uh he basically uh Boots Riley said that that wasn't I don't think oh sorry, go ahead. I don't think that's Boots Riley said that Spike Lee sorry Boots Riley said Spike Lee didn't go far enough, and that was a whitewashing. And Spike Lee was one of the very you know, one of the most rebellious uh outsider movie makers, and Boots Riley's like, nah, you're you're you're you're just right of center now, dude. Get out of the way.
SPEAKER_01One of the one of the things that was kind of one of the points of I Love Boosters is now is not the time to be subtle. Okay, because it's really in your face, like cartoonish, but not cartoonish. Uh, and if you haven't seen a Boots Riley movie or television show before, just be prepared for weird shit to happen. Like, if you haven't seen Sorry to Bother You Already, I would almost recommend watching that first before going to see uh I Love Boosters, because then you won't be like, Oh, because there's like a third act turn where you're like, What the fuck?
SPEAKER_04Uh very like um, very frenetic, uh like clippy editing and stuff that is like it's just very one of those like big match cut, and then you hear like ding, like in the trailer, like one of those, just like it's very like if you have ADHD, I think they're great because the camera never almost never stops moving. Like it's it's always doing something interesting.
SPEAKER_00Also, Boots Riley did the movie, uh, the television show on one of the streaming platforms Prime, uh, where uh there's a kid who is giant, essentially, uh, and kind of it's kind of a superhero, yeah. Kind of a superhero in uh on the very outskirts of of what superhero dumb means. And there's a character that does have essentially ADHD, and it is one of the greatest depictions of ADHD on film ever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh the show is called I'm a Virgo, I'm a Virgo.
SPEAKER_00Uh the girl that has has the affliction, uh, is listening to everyone, and then her mind is racing, and she can she moves really fast, essentially. So anytime someone is talking to her, by the time they get the second word out, she already knows what they're going to say. Not premonition, but just she's move her brain is moving so fast that it's like, okay, okay, okay, yes, I know, I know, I know. But she also understands that it's rude to interrupt her, but I'm like, I know that struggles so well, and I uh this is one of the most accurate depictions of an ADHD brain with autism. So yeah, big ups on uh big ups on that one. We love that. Uh uh a little bit of side business. Uh the we've handed over management to Zach uh Bennett. He is uh social media manager, he is editing, and he is also demanding that we start working on uh our new social media uh application. So we are going to look for people. Uh we don't have any money to pay you, but we will uh at the end when the end product does come, and if it does make any money, we will share it with you and we will help make you famous, and we will try to get you a job or whatever it takes. But we need somebody engineering-wise uh to basically help us create a social media where we can start siphoning off of all the people that are leaving all the other social medias and something that is uh basically the people that hate what Facebook has become, uh the people that hate what Twitter has become, the people that liked Twitter in the beginning, the people that liked Facebook in the beginning and hate what it has become, we will try to make something new that is what you are looking for, and something that we will try in our most earnest effort to try to avoid becoming what it is now. So uh if you are into coding, if you know a little bit of anything, uh even if you are uh a quality control person, you know, uh any any help helps or anybody, yeah, any help helps uh and uh or spread the word. Uh find someone that hey, this person is brilliant, and I would like them to be a part of this project because we need to get that started soon because everything is collapsing, and the faster AI comes online, the faster the world is falling apart. Not to scare everyone, but uh we are we we are we do want to be the beacon of light and hope in the world, and we want to find a safe place for people to chit-chat. Yes, because at the moment management told me to say the internet is eating itself.
SPEAKER_01Management told me to say something completely different. Oh, what did management Zach Bennett told me he wanted to be a guest on the podcast, and he wanted us to be a guest on his podcast. So uh I gave him a list of future topics that we have coming up, and he has picked a topic, so yay.
SPEAKER_00And if also if uh you want to be a booker for the show uh and you like to reach out and connect people, then uh you know hit Jackie at uh email Jackie at Jackie at O. Ah, let me try this again. Hit up Jackie at Jackie at valley of o.com. We don't have any official uh eon uh tags because I gave up on that a long ago. I had a I had a uh I had a podcast, Soma Cal. We had the perfect uh URL, seven letters, perfectly balanced, great stickers, it looked good. We had all the emails set up, we had the backup gmail set up, we had everything. Uh we didn't we have a gmail.
SPEAKER_01Oh, we do? Well, yes, everything on nothing one at gmail.com because everything on nothing regular was just taken. We also have uh Facebook and Instagram already. I just haven't done anything with them.
SPEAKER_00I'm I probably registered everything on nothing like 12 no 20 years ago whenever I registered the URL and held on to it. I basically someone came to me and they said, Hey, I need help. And uh they told me what their podcast was going to be about. And I said, in the middle of the night, I I worked nights at the time and I came up with this idea. I'm like, oh, this is a great, this is this name fits exactly what the you know, the podcast that they explained to me. And then they came back and they said, Hey, we we're gonna use this name. And I was like, All right, well, fine, I'm gonna hold on to this URL. And uh then one night uh we were sitting around, I was like, Hey, let's do this. And so here we are, and uh we've already got requests for guests. Awesome. So, with that being said, is there anything else? Oh, yeah, big uh big shout out to uh Kyle for creating the amazing theme song. Yes, uh, if you are in the Portland area, uh try to find Dear Sandy and visit because it is an amazing bar, and you will have some fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you'll have the best cocktails. Kate is incredible at what she does. That is Kyle's lady friend.
SPEAKER_00Um, also, oh yeah, you said you wanted to mention uh a friend of ours, Heather had recorded her comedy special in Wisconsin, and it is up on YouTube now.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and we have watched it.
SPEAKER_00It is classic Heather, it is classic Heather, and it is very funny, and it's a very good time. So go uh look for Heather Shaw comedy special on YouTube.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's called All Right See You, but I might be wrong.
SPEAKER_00That's very, very good. Um yeah, I just I'm still trying to change I I am a very uh shy person and I don't talk to people unless spoken to because that was beaten into me as a child, literally. And so it it's kind of a weird reversal of roles. Like uh in in class, uh they were asking how to pronounce my name and all that stuff, and then where's it from? And after uh an hour of answering the question of where my name came from, uh, then I was like, is there any other questions?
SPEAKER_03And they were like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no more questions.
SPEAKER_00Uh but uh again, I as I mentioned earlier, uh, this is a topic I am not very well versed on. I um although I played all the early games of esports, or what became the the backbone and the foundation of esports, I was there at every step. I just didn't realize I just thought it was a cool little fun thing in the drugstore that I was at, or a fun thing at my friend's house, or when I was on the uh boat in the Navy, we got an arcade cabinet of a game, and it was like, okay, this is cool, but I you know, again, being ADHD, watching someone play and waiting my turn was not in my wheelhouse, and watching so and when in with the advent of YouTube and and all that stuff and streaming, I don't have the patience to watch someone else because I'm like, move it over there, move it, and most of the games that are in the esports realm. We would we did uh some we did a quick check of what games there are and leak like League of Legends. Holy sh I would never be able to play that game. It is my brain melted just watching a uh two-minute clip of it, and it's like, holy cow.
SPEAKER_04It so we are yeah, it truly is like unparsable, and like it's it's it's a long, strange trip. Uh because you look at it and you go, and listen, I mean, like, I have played that game. Uh-huh. Playing that game is like watching that game. That's it's like you if you if you you just start playing it, you're like, okay, I think I understand. You know, like you've practiced, you can we can play with bots, right? And nothing prepares you for like getting yelled at by like another human that you don't know, and then you're like, Yeah, I do this for fun, so I guess I'm out. I guess I just I guess I just don't get to play this one. Uh so like this this was a lot of um learning for me as well, because I was alongside it as well. I mean, I had that same experience where it's like I understand that people compete in this, I don't get it. I like don't I deeply don't understand it.
SPEAKER_01Um but should should we say the official question?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, let's yeah, the the question is official question was do they have or no?
SPEAKER_01The official question is esports has uniforms.
SPEAKER_00And to call uh to quote Call of Duty Pro Clayster, throw me to the wolves and I'll come back leading the pack. We're gonna hand this one over to Christian to answer this question.
SPEAKER_04Uh yeah, so esports and the uniforms. It's a long story. It actually is funny. It begins uh three and a half billion years ago on the planet Earth. Uh maybe you've heard of it. It's that's where I'm from. And we don't know their names, but it was uh basically the first single-celled bacteria to evolve a uh an evolution uh uh uh a process called uh phagocytosis, which is where one cell uh how it gets its nutrients is it is it completely engulfs, it surrounds and engulfs and dissolves another cell.
SPEAKER_00It's kind of like a a circle that stretches out into an oval, and the oval goes all the way around the food and then just kind of collapses back in.
SPEAKER_04They they like they kind of uh I think usually. It's almost like they form a uh almost like a like a horseshoe, like a U. And then they kind of and then they like kind of I don't know how they do it. I don't know what cells do. There's a lipid bilayer, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. We all know these things. Um, but uh anyway, that's how that was uh when the concept of winning was invented. Um so that was three and a half billion years ago. We invented not us, but our ancestors, these bacteria, invented winning. And then a few years later in 3100 BC, uh, the Egyptians came up with a board game called Senate. Okay. And they think the archaeologists think that like this was the first, one of the first, like, structured uh it's like a structured leisure activity with rules, you know, a win state and all this other stuff. There were things before it probably like uh tic-tac-toe or something simple like that, might have uh been like the first kind of sit-down game. I feel like that's the distinction, is like uh a lot of like we've had uh uh competitions forever, right?
SPEAKER_00Um even when we were talking about the the Neanderthals, when we uh Jackie and I had watched one uh the one where they found the the footprints on the beach and stuff, uh they also found something that like they don't know for sure, but it could be something like a chess board.
SPEAKER_04Oh wow.
SPEAKER_00Um, but it's like they have like it's one of those ones where I really, really hope it's a chess board. Kind of uh the the scientist was like, I really hope it's like it's but they don't have it's kind of like they have a board that has marks on it, so it could be a cutting board, it could be this, it could be that, or whatever. They don't have enough pieces to say, Oh, yeah, this is definitely a game that they were playing. So there's fingers crossing in the in the Neanderthal study world that the Neanderthals beat the Egyptians to it.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah. I mean, I would love that. I would love for it to be like 10,000 years older than what we think.
SPEAKER_00They want to win. Neanderthal scientists want to win.
SPEAKER_01I just pulled it up to look at the game board, and it looks like really cool. It's all self-contained, like the pieces fit inside the board. I don't understand how any of the moves work or anything, or like what anything is for, but in some cases, like its own piece of furniture, and that's awesome. Like, you know, the old school Pizza Hut video games.
SPEAKER_04The cocktail table, the arcades, yeah, yeah. Where you yeah, you could get pizza all over your Miss Pac-Man and they could just go. Um, so and uh, so we've had we've had competitions forever, obviously, physically. Um, but I think like Senate is is interesting in that it was like clearly this was separate from like something like uh oh, who can throw the spear the furthest? That's like a survival skill that evolves into a competition. Whereas this is a little more cerebral. This is separate. It's a it's a I don't know if it would could be out and out called a leisure activity. I don't know like to what extent Egyptians had that uh in their lives. Uh it it's it's ornate, so I'm guessing it was the royalty. So maybe they had more time, you know, to sit down and play these dangle that modern Senate that's ruining the youth. Um, so then in 1650 BC, we have Pitts, which is the Mesoamerican ball game you may have seen in the hit movie Road to El Dorado, uh, where they got a hip chuck a uh actually, you know what? I don't know, I don't know if that's if that game's real, but I think that was like very similar to something to Pitts. Uh they have I I'm remembering now that they use like a rolled up armadillo, and I don't think that was part of the game.
SPEAKER_01I think it's just pause. What is this movie? I don't think Rogue El Dorado.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I have no idea. Sorry, Road Del Dorado is a um it's an animated DreamWorks uh picture back when I think like Don Bluth was still doing lots of stuff at at Dreamworks. It looks very much like a Don Bluth movie.
SPEAKER_00Um wait, wait, is that the one where uh you said 90s, right?
SPEAKER_04I think it's in the late nineties or early 2000s.
SPEAKER_00Okay, because I remember there was a movie where Disney and um 2000. Oh wow, right on the right on the millennium. Like uh, I know Disney and Dolly did something that had something to do with El Dorado, but that was way, way before Salvador Dolly.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Uh they they were they were trying to make a movie for a really long time, and it's the it's actually like the biggest tragedy. It's called Destino, and it was it's the biggest tragedy in the world that that never came out. You can see a little bit of it and how rad it would have been. Uh, there's like four clips on YouTube of varying quality. Um, I would that it kind of upsets me that Disney has like billions of dollars and they're just like, I don't know, Spider-Man again. Like, just make finish Destino.
SPEAKER_00Um they'll do it whenever they get the AI online so they don't have to pay an artist to do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, or the the cast on this movie is stacked, bro. It has Kevin Klein, Kenneth Brana, Rosie Perez, Armand Desante, not a big deal nowadays, but back then he was really big deal. Edwards James almost, and the songs were written by Elton John and Tim Rice. Like, there's a lot of star power there.
SPEAKER_04The bad guy is Jim Cummings of uh almost every bad guy from a 90s animated film uh that you've ever heard. He's uh he's like the captain of the guard in Aladdin. He's uh he's also uh Winnie the Pooh and Ka the Snake. So he's uh but he also is like a very he plays Hernan Cortez. Maybe you've heard of that guy. The movie rules, honestly. I don't know if it holds up. Uh there might be, I don't I don't know what stuff is gonna make you upset these days in uh in Road El Dorado, but I remember enjoying it a lot when I was when I was younger.
SPEAKER_01I'm good at putting movies through time filters, like if it's in the 2000s, like oh, this is what I have to delete from my brain to be worried about.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there's some things you can just be like, this sucks for sure. But like if it was just like a kind of one-off thing in a movie that where it was like the rest of it is good, I feel like don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, maybe.
SPEAKER_00Uh my brain is adjusted to watching things in like if I'm watching a 1975 film, I'm understanding like my brain goes to what was happening in 1975, why are they telling the story? Why what's going on? I do that with music and songs and comics and everything else. It's like, why are they telling this? Why are they saying this? Why you know there's so much it's yeah, someone was writing a story, but that story came from somewhere and inspired like remakes. A lot of people get upset at remakes, but it's like they're remaining if it's a cheesy money grab, that's one thing, but like if they're remaking something and changing it to adapt to today's standards and or uh kind of oh, the villain is now this because this is the new villain in the world. I get it, and I can watch through that lens and that filter and and kind of understand and and grow to love a remake.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's it's kind of like how you just you you start to notice uh how often the British get used as as bad as like very boilerplate bad guys for for like a good stretch of of movie history. Um, so we've got the the the ball game, it's a ball game, and and I added that because that is I think it's like it's it's not quite a survival thing. It's it's now it's got structure and rules, and we've got a sort of an implement to interact with the game, which is the ball. So we're adding like interface into the idea of of games and competition. Okay. Um, again, separate from war and separate from um like honing survival skills like running and swimming and and spear throwing.
SPEAKER_00My muscles are better than your muscles. This is outside that loop.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it's like about accuracy, it's about a different there's this different skill that's being um being honed. Uh and I and I think that's like maybe that's that's I'm trying to find that DNA. Obviously, the bacteria was a joke, but uh it was too funny to get rid of to me. Um and now we begin the like the real journey. Um video games, they keep on like finding like uh computers in basements and talking to older and older uh nerds, uh you know, like MIT and Harvard graduates, and we keep on like digging down and finding earlier and earlier instances of what could be called a video game.
SPEAKER_00Um the whole era of the penny arcade and uh you know uh pinball, pinball was big from like 19 early 190s, the aughts, I think was some version of it, and and then until the 1950s, and and then it was like, hey, wait a second, what if we did it this way?
SPEAKER_04And what's incredible is I believe, I believe if we want if we want to like because video is like that distinction, right? Because a pinball, that's that's craft and that's physicality. That's um that again, it's in the DNA for sure. I actually kind of did skip over sort of carnival games. Um but the the the that yeah, the R that is where the arcade comes from, um is is from those physical uh like there's a ball and you have to get it to a certain place, but very tiny. It's not it's no longer a physical thing, it's a hand eye, it's fine motor. Um, and so but but then they that then we started getting um electric screens, uh video screens. And uh I want to say that the first was sometime in 1950s, I think it was it's real, it's weirdly early, like 1956 or something. Uh and the first game was uh this thing that was like you put it on an oscilloscope, yeah, and I believe it was just called chase. And so that was just you there was two dots, and you had to control one dot and not get hit by the other dot. So it was like the first instance of of this light being projected and us being able to interact with that, which is crazy because that's not long after the concept of an electric screen was invented. I thought it was gonna be way longer uh before we figured out that we could in we could like we could show we could mirror something on an electronic screen, but then to interact back with it, I thought that would take way longer. Apparently, we were like jumping at the gun to do it.
SPEAKER_00Um a lot of people think oh, the computer came out in the 80s, and you know, because the the the picture of uh of what a computer is is the beige box that sits on your desk. But uh Alan Turing, if you watched the movie uh with um Bumba Bum Country Bech, uh was it Bumba Bum Country Batch? I think so.
SPEAKER_01I think so. So yeah, yeah, the it the imitation game is what it was called.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a computer size. That was a computer. Uh in you know, his uh it wasn't a uh it didn't have any semiconductors, it still used uh tubes and stuff, but a semiconductor is just a solid tube uh because tubes are expensive after a while because of all the glass that's used and stuff like that. But that like the all the Enigma machines and all of the things that were used in World War I think even back in World War I, they had some sort of computing technology that required some sort of mechanical devices, but it came to light in uh World War II, and then all those people that we helped escape from Nazism, paperclip, uh all those people that were working on that stuff for destruction were pulled over here and um use that power for capitalism.
SPEAKER_04Or as we like to call it in the United States, the side of good.
SPEAKER_01I was about to call it our current destruction.
SPEAKER_04Um so you know, there were these there were all kinds of these big honking computers that only existed in university basements in the computer science departments. Um, that that they kept doing this. They kept on uh you know programming little game after little game chase. They did uh tennis for two was one of the big ones, and that of obviously would eventually it's funny because it's tennis for two really is almost like this fundamental idea where it's like you know, how can we get the we how can we create like a Twitch interaction, you know, a second to second based interaction with a with that win-lose state? And it's like tennis is like kind of the fundamental thing a ball bouncing and you have to be there in time to hit it. Uh and then you just put one on each side, give each guy a controller. And I guess if you want to, if you want to the private, you know, uh uh history of the competition scene, that's probably where human beings begin to first face off against each other. But again, these are like this is the computer science wing of MIT. This is not a big uh thing, and and this kind of uh gets gets uh this this era ends and begins the new one where the at MIT in 1972 they held a competition with a prize uh for space war. Again, one of these like the computer is the size of like uh uh a greenhouse, and the screen is the size of like your your hand, you know, like so it's just a they're they're playing on this big hawk and machine. Uh and the prize, again, you know, these are probably scientists and and students and stuff, uh, but the prize was uh a whopping Rolling Stone magazine subscription.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and uh I like the the head professor or whatever supplied all the beer and pizza or whatever for everyone to come in and uh uh incoming dad joke. Uh I went to MIT, had lunch there. And the next day I went to Harvard. Sorry about that.
SPEAKER_01You can get a dead out of its two bad keep it, keep it, Zach, keep it.
SPEAKER_04I went to Harvard and I whooped Stephen Hawking's ass in Space War, the Space War Nationals in Boston.
SPEAKER_01We watched like a little YouTube video about that in particular, and I was really enamored by how round the screens were versus the square boxes they are today. And I kind of wish I had a round computer screen.
SPEAKER_00I've thought about this too much. I will say, well, I mean, I think that's a big thing in uh in the Fallout series because that's when that's pretty much uh at the end of Fallout begins at the split of history, and we went square boxes. The Fallout kind of kept the the round screens on a lot of stuff, but um it I will say from experience it is hard to use an oscilloscope without trying to make it dance. Uh if you're like if you're just doing your job, so there are some people that are like they'll plug it in, they get the picture, and okay, let's move on. But most of the smart people that I've known that have had to use an oscilloscope in one form or another, uh end up trying to make it dance because it's it is just so fun.
SPEAKER_04I I think that there is I would put money if I had money. Um, do any of you have money? No, I would put I would put money on uh on there being a script that's been floating around for many years that it that is approaching telling the story of this competition, this space war thing. I think it's I think it's like a funny turning point. It's a basement beer tournament with a bunch of like again, just like guys who went to MIT, like serious like engineers and and students, but there but it was this era where that was also kind of like a hippie guy sometimes.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_04I just love that that era, that sort of we're talking 1970s. We're looking at like right before uh Pong. Pong would hit the scene, and Pong uh I know that there's a big Pong uh competition. The I think Space Invaders beat it by being an official tournament, uh by maybe like maybe it was just earlier in that year. Um, but Pong would have been the first time you could get your hands on on a on a game on a video game.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, first commercial, first commercial outlet was Pong, but that but that was 10 years after Space War.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but so then Atari. Um I think we're looking at Pong, we're looking at arcades, uh, these big machines with big TVs in them that that play extremely simple games. Um, all score-based, all sort of like a score, what we would call score attack now. It's it was all there, I don't think there were really any multiplayer with the exception of your pong machines. There might be one or two other small, like a racing one, I think there was that was that was not not far after this in the 70s. Um, but mostly you were got nexting. You were playing a game yourself, you were getting to a certain score, you lost all your guys, and then guy put us quarter on the thing, and he got next, and he tried to beat your score. And that was the competition. Competition was uh runs, you know, people were trying to be out to get their initials above the the the other guy. Um, and that was the culture there. Uh until Atari then went meta and had a Space Invaders tournament. Uh it was the first organized multi-level tournament. They had people in like beer and bar scenes kind of like uh compete and send in their scores, and then the best guys, you know, it was a uh whatever you call it, a bracket, you know, there were brackets. Um and they they moved up. And I don't remember what the uh oh right, okay. I don't remember what the prize was, but this that's not the interesting part. The interesting part about the about this one is uh oh no, I'm sorry, that's the next one. So 1981, there's the national video game championships that's put on by Tournament Games, I think, international. And this was a this was like everything that was out, you know, you could was kind of on the floor. Uh, you know, they had space invaders, they had um man, I want to say Pong was involved. Uh there was a few more things out by then, but uh before we go on. Oh, sorry.
SPEAKER_00Well, before we go forward, uh the the bomb that uh Space Invaders dropped was the the uh pronounced high score displayed while you're playing.
SPEAKER_04Oh, that was like an innovation for that.
SPEAKER_00That was yeah, before that, it was like you get your score, there you go. Remember, like they they built in memory to so that you get that high score and it's up there, and then I don't think they had um uh initials or uh signing in or the list at the end. I think that came a little bit later, but yeah, Space Invaders putting the high score uh kind of it's an advent uh uh you know, part of it is why should an arcade owner invest in this game? And it's like, well, you know, technology is built on making things addictive, uh, part of it. And that high score being on the screen made people start chasing it, made people start dropping more quarters, made people addicted to the machine and getting in there.
SPEAKER_04Yes, this was uh this this is this is I really think this is like when I when I when it comes to stories, this is the most fascinating and fun period of like video games history. Like it's like you still have this like kind of hippie um uh mindset, but blended with this how do we sell this thing that's like kind of expensive and complicated to people, yeah. Uh, and there's a lot of cocaine flying around, and it's it's it's a little bit rock and roll. It's very like, like I said, I think there's a lot of like uh good stuff in here for like movies and and shows and stuff.
SPEAKER_01I I got an I got a movie idea out of our tiny bit of research that we did on this.
SPEAKER_04That's yeah, uh every time like Nolan Bushnell talks about uh being at Atari when they were making like the 2600, um, which I believe is like in the the ballpark where we're at right now, the 2600, the Atari 2600, the wood grain joystick thing. Um I I it's I get this weird pang of like, and it's just so funny. I'm not like a big into cocaine or anything, but it's just like it sounds like such a raucous, stinky party, and I I love it. It's just dumb nerds, uh, like being dumb nerds, but at this like extremely high level, they're fucking around with this like thing that's had this recent success, and they're just trying to figure out how to, like you said, like get the quarters, you know how to get play.
SPEAKER_00And uh, part of my brain is putting things into context, and it's like most of the people at MIT probably suffered from undiagnosed ADHD and some form of autism. And if you get Ritalin is basically a derivative of cocaine, so uh here you have a bunch of unfocused genius now getting cocaine and becoming like if you give cocaine to anybody, they become an asshole, you know, but If you give cocaine to a a kid with autism or uh a person with autism and ADHD, they become highly focused and highly productive. And like they could probably sit there and uh either code the game for uh days on end or play the game for days on end and be it.
SPEAKER_04And and make no mistake, that part, the coding is like however hard you think coding is now this was like this was like communing with the machine spirit directly. Levels of like arcane bullshit that they were coding line by line. So it's like, yeah, you can have a little cocaine if you want. That's fine.
SPEAKER_01So I'm not like a drug girly. Wouldn't you have to do like a lot of cocaine to maintain the high? Because isn't cocaine like a short-lived burst and not like the slow time release of like Ritalin or Adderall or something like that? Uh yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_04It's it's definitely that does nothing for me because I'm an ADHD girly. It like it, I think it just folds in with whatever I've got going on, and it's like, oh yeah, oh, he's gonna talk a lot.
SPEAKER_00Like he does like yeah, think about think of how you react, uh Jackie, how you react to like way too many like you had two large cups of coffee that sticks around for a while, and it you usually crash hard. Uh not you personally, but the the royal you. Uh, after you've done a lot of coffee, you buzz for a very long time and then you crash.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And cocaine's very similar. I've never done cocaine, I've avoided it because I know what would happen to me is I would uh want more and more and more and run out of money and get rid of my house and car and live on the street and then have to beg for money for cocaine.
SPEAKER_04But so I've avoided works on me too.
SPEAKER_00So I have been deathly afraid of cocaine my entire life, and I've avoided it not because of any moral obligation or anything like that. I just being able to visualize autistically all the way, like if I sniff this, I can see where the rest of my life goes, and it's not a pretty picture. And uh plus I've watched a lot of movies of people on cocaine and it never ends well. Um so so but yeah, there's that there is a crash, uh, but it you do have you know a couple hours of it, so you know, you could snort, snort, do it.
SPEAKER_01I forgot I had a Google, I could just add something.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and and like I I think that like I'm not I mean, I have a term, I don't know if it's a if it's a commonly used term or not, but you know, there's the whole idea of like a cocaine idea, and it's like your brain, and it could be just be that a normal person, you know, has this kind of dormant ability that's like just sort of sped up by by by the drug. Uh, but like uh I just feel like it was like, oh, what do we let's make a porn game, you know, yeah, creating a porn and games, and that would be a good idea. And then like it wasn't a good idea, like you know, like this. It also it's just funny because you're hearing all these stories about raucous parties and drugs and stuff like that. Nolan's always like, I never did any, but you know, whatever. Um, but you know, you you're these people that are being interviewed, they're all they're they are telling rock star stories, and they look like your dad. You know, that's that's like the best part of it, is that it's just like it's like I'm Trip Hawkins, and back in the day, whoa, that was a wild party, you know.
SPEAKER_00Back but it's also like uh uh weed brain, like for for me, uh and Jackie and and other artistic people, you go on weed, and the questions I ask on weed are not weed questions, they're questions that are in my brain, it's just the weed removes the filter, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And there are people that ask dumbass questions when they're on weed. Um, and if you have stupid people with stupid ideas and the cocaine just kind of speeds it up for a short period of time, and if you can't grasp a hold of it and and fo and and you don't have the right brain to kind of explain it to the other people, then it gets lost in the weeds. But there are people that if they're on cocaine, they just they're like they're like yeah, the wavelength, yeah, and it just you know the antenna matches up with the signal and they hit it hard and they get productive. It's just whenever they do then they start getting into that groove and they're like, Oh, the cocaine is allowing me to do this, and then they start relying on the cocaine, then they start doing too much cocaine, and then that kind of moves it out of that antenna.
SPEAKER_04Uh yeah, they they forget that they're the magic, and the cocaine is the amplifier, and then all of a sudden, yeah, all of a sudden your company's name is Infogroms instead of Atari. Um, how did that happen? Cool game. Um, so my favorite line from uh from Dirty Work is uh God damn it's like a movie. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? He goes, No, I have an idea. Um so in 1981, there's the this is uh this is not the the the platform holder, this is an Atari, it's uh turd tournament games, the National V Game Championships. And I again I don't know what the what the prize was, but this is the funniest part. Uh it was a $60 entry to this to this championship, and the machines were not free. They're still coin operated, and they were not free, so you had to bring your own quarters, I guess. Uh so uh only like 150 people uh competed.
SPEAKER_01Uh just I wonder how many total quarters were spent.
SPEAKER_04I'm that's a fascinating question. I wish I knew, but like what a like they couldn't figure out how to like put them on free play or like put it on bypass or better, they knew how to do that and decided let's make a few more extra bucks off of the competition people, uh, which uh wasn't the first time that game companies and and their uh their orbitals would would figure out hey, look at these bags of cash walking in. Um 1982 Twin Galaxies scoreboard, which is uh uh like a sort of a platform agnostic leaderboard. They're trying to be the Guinness World Records of Games, uh founded by Walter Day. Um they also held competitions and they required like video proof of you playing the game. Photo even wasn't enough. So again, you're kind of like a high ceiling for like being able to kind of be in this competition.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like only rich people can do that because you have to have the system, you have to have a camera, and then disposable income enough to have multiple tapes and not have to just tape over the same one over and over again.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, like well, yeah, or like find your rich friend who's like to go birds video camera, I'm gonna be the world's greatest uh Donkey Kong player or whatever. Uh I think we're still pre-Dockey Kong, but um, and then uh oh, so back in between, oh sorry.
SPEAKER_00Oh, before we go any further, I know this this is one of the topics that Jackie wanted to talk about, and uh eventually she's gonna make a movie about it. But rewinding just a little bit to 1977, yeah, uh there was a company called Gremlin, and at the time they uh uh across the board, uh were le West Coast, East Coast, and Japan, China, and all basically everyone figured out how to make a uh basically a snake game. Like if everyone that's ever had a Nokia game or a Nokia phone has played the snake game, and so different companies had their own versions of it. And Gremlin uh found two ladies that were exceptionally good at it, and part of how do we get people uh uh attracted to this game, find two attractive women that play the game and you get your time playing against them. And they toured, I think it was 19 different cities across the country. Yeah, and they played over 1,500 games or something like that, and they lost seven.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like uh they had a 99 or 99.005 success rate in beating everyone that came out.
SPEAKER_01And and the way it had to work is they had to beat, they had played three games and they had to beat the girls in two out of the out of the three games. And if they could do that, they would get a crisp $100 bill.
SPEAKER_04Here you go, Dutz, don't spend it all on makeup.
SPEAKER_00And it's one of those stories that has been buried, and uh Jackie's gonna just start doing the research and making a movie out of it.
SPEAKER_04Like it's such a good story, it's such a good story that actually rules who's gonna be playing opposite Aubrey Plaza as the other girl because it's obviously gonna be Aubrey Plaza as the first one.
SPEAKER_01I would put El Fanning there.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I think they're both too old. Maybe not that they're old, but I mean we're talking like uh 19 whoever's whoever's the it girl uh in like three five to ten years, yeah. Yeah, oh okay.
SPEAKER_04I don't know how to grow. I feel good about not knowing how to grow that.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, me neither.
SPEAKER_04I feel good that I'm like she's still young. She just didn't mind child's play.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we were going through IMDb, and I was like, Oh yeah, he's in uh uh he's in this movie with um hot chick, and Jackie goes Opripaza. I'm like, Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, what about Sadie Sink from um um um Stranger Things? She's already got the 80s vibe, and she's I think she's the right age, and she's gonna live alone forever. Yeah, that's she's talented as hell. I've seen her in person.
SPEAKER_00But someone bet milk, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I guess even Margaret Quali's getting getting a little she's getting up there for Hollywood.
SPEAKER_01So she's gonna have to start taking home moments pretty soon.
SPEAKER_04Um that's a that's an awesome story.
SPEAKER_00Uh I just I just wanted to wedge that in here while we're like right around the 80s.
SPEAKER_04It's it's a good wedge because it also kind of highlights something that I wasn't like dancing around, but I didn't know really where to put it, so it might as well be here, which is that obviously this was a very, very, very male dominated thing psychologically and sort of in the marketing and uh like in once we get to the 2000s, guys, it's it's so bad. It's so it's so bad once it's on like once it's on like specialty cable and they they have a little bit more free reign to to to be gross. Uh you really see uh why I don't like anybody calling you don't call someone a gamer unless you really mean it. You want to hurt them. Um, because there's just this culture when people like people talk about like oh gaming culture, it's about it's like, do you mean like sexism and homophobia and like all this other dumb bad shit? Uh we we we've only recently begun to grow, I think, a proper like culture in games, uh in game playing with with the ubiquity of of everything.
SPEAKER_00But um let's say there were a lot more women involved in the early days of production and starting of the revolution of gaming and computers and technology that got buried because they were kind of the out, you know, they weren't sexy and they weren't, you know, yeah, weren't marketable.
SPEAKER_01There's a lot of people who weren't as loud about it as the men were because the men are used to being loud.
SPEAKER_04And also it's like there there were there there are people during these times. Um, I mean, like, I don't know. The only person I can think of is like Yokoshima who's mu who's music. She does music, but she's done it for forever. Um, and she's like she's like very you know well regarded. Um, but like when I think also it's like you know, Nolan Bushnell is like the CEO of Atari. And so, or Shigeru Miyamoto is like the kind of head direct uh creative director of a lot of these Nintendo games. And there are women here working, and there are other people also, men and women, that you you don't this isn't it's not a hero industry, weirdly. They they need heroes in order for like marketing, they need personalities in order to kind of anchor it to especially the the when they would do conventions and stuff like that and big industry talks. You need your guy to come out and be kind of personable and and tell you about these products, but tell you about what the future of the company is and all that kind of jazz. But so you end up with these personalities, and everyone else, everyone else who actually does make it happen gets washed away.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_04Um, much in the same way that movies do. You don't know who you're like. I've only recently really been able to be like, oh wow, whoever did the costumes in this was amazing. And it's like we don't even get that far, you know, in the way that we a lot of times when they release like the Oscar nominations every year.
SPEAKER_01I get so angry because they'll be like the director of this movie and say the director's name when they're nominated. But like when you get to the technical awards, like the costume designer and even the fucking composer, they'll just say the movie title and not the person who actually did the work. It's infuriating to me.
SPEAKER_04That's that's gross, especially for something like Composer, which like helps that's that is like that's the audio component of the movie, you know.
SPEAKER_01I think music is one of the most important aspects of a movie, but like how are kids supposed to have other aspirations to look up to other than actor? Like, I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid, so everyone assumed I wanted to be an actor. I never wanted to be an actor, but that was just the only path that people saw for that.
SPEAKER_04I I wanted to be like Phil Tippett or uh uh like Stan Winston so bad. You know, I never made any steps towards doing that, but that was whenever I would look at like the the people doing stuff behind the scenes in movies, the only shit I cared about was like who is working in the Jim Henson's creature shop? Can I get that job? Oh yeah, I'm gonna put latex on a bug man.
SPEAKER_00And like, had I known about the Steve Bushimi movie, uh, where they showed all the behind-the-scenes stuff of you know, the entire movie is showing them making a movie, and it's like, oh, there's a special guy that just pushes record. And you know, yeah, I I would have loved doing that job because I have been a fan of audio, like I used to do dubs. Uh with I I got a two-deck uh boom box and I would dub the crap out of stuff. And even before that, I was I had uh I was playing around with my turntable and making all kinds of weird noise, even though I've had never been exposed to uh the DJs of New York. And had someone said, Hey, check this out, here's this, look behind look behind the curtain. I'd have been like, Oh, okay, I I'm not just making noise, I can make something from this. This is awesome. So I yeah, the the industry needs to start self-feeding, like they should have been self-feeding forever, uh, instead of relegating, oh, everyone wants to be a director, you're not good enough, so then you do the sound. It's not that way. It's someone is specializing in making creatures or making sounds or there used to be there used to be like respect in all job categories, and that is gone.
SPEAKER_01Like, I read uh an article the other day about somebody who worked for Sears in like the 80s, and it was a career, it was a respected career to work at Sears and not just something that you did when you couldn't do anything else. Like this guy, I mean, obviously it was the 80s, times were different. He owned a house, he went on a vacation with his family every year. They had no worry about eating. Like uh, he worked his hours and wasn't asked to do anything extra. It was just he did his job, he went home, he lived a great life, and there's nothing like that anymore.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and it uh you wonder if like the public perception of like the retail worker or you know, like because I yeah, I feel like that was when they were really going like the customer's always right, you know, because we want people to come into our store. Um, and it's a it's a great customer's always right is like a great way to get the concept of what you are doing in customer service done and over with in one second to to a dummy, you know. Not to say that everyone who works in I've worked at that was all I did for 18 years was work in customer service. And it is a difficult job, but the it is never acknowledged by people not in that it's never acknowledged by your customers who don't work in that industry themselves. Uh, you know, you are you are a tool to get a job done. You are you are there to if I need to know where the eggs are, you are there to point, you know. Um, and I wonder if that maybe that that reputation is what uh sort of helped. I mean, capitalism is capitalism, but yeah, yeah, we're not we're not having parades for the retail workers unless uh we're all trapped inside and all of a sudden everyone needs uh toilet paper. Uh yeah. The summer of being essential was uh boy, that was it's you've have you ever been a tool for propaganda? That's wild. Um so uh let's see. So we're uh between 1981 and 1983, uh, we get the first televised video game kind of competition show, and that is uh Starkade with Alex Trubec. Oh yeah, everybody's friend Alex Trubec, he didn't do anything bad, right? I don't think so. The weird comment he made to an Indian contestant, and I think that was the worst of it, I hope.
SPEAKER_00That and yeah, that and uh he said something about uh nerdcore rap that uh ended up coming in. All the nerdcore rappers came out and they made a compilition compilation uh song, and it got a lot of good sales.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, even his bad comments ended up being he also kind of uh I gotta do some more research, but he kind of like was like the Me Too movement, young boys testosterone, that's what they're gonna do. That's okay.
SPEAKER_04What a weird, what a weird uh opinion to come out of that guy, especially. Uh but but I do just the idea of him of him having some kind of uh problem with anything is just very like I just can't imagine him angry. Uh credit credit to credit to him a little bit for the acting job, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Okay, this let me tell you one more Alex Trubeck fact that I just found out. This is hysterical. He moderated the Pennsylvania gubernatorial debate in 2018 and uh like ate up all the time talking himself. He talked for uh 45 minutes of the debate instead of letting the other people have time to talk. Oh I think that's hysterical. That is my Alex Tribeck story.
SPEAKER_04That's really good. And you know what? Honestly, that's probably better for Pennsylvania overall.
SPEAKER_01I would have voted for him probably.
SPEAKER_04Can I vote for that guy? Um so uh yeah, so that was like that was big. I guess he uh 1981. He's been he had done uh Jeopardy for a while. I don't know when his Jeopardy run began. I assume. Let me see. What's this before or after 81? I feel like he was I think he was on it earlier, on Jeopardy earlier than that. No, 84. 84. Okay, so this precedes this precedes Jeopardy uh by a couple of years. So really, if you you know, oh that Jeopardy with that guy from Starcade. Um yeah, so and this was uh all of these, by the way, all of these like competitions have like weird, they're single player games for the most part. Um so what they're doing is they are because the games have different scoring systems, they're kind of going like, well, if you get so many points in this, it's it's this much. If you, you know, and then uh you play Tetris until you lose. Like there's like all this like weird uh uh that was that was the Nintendo championship uh that would happen a little bit later. Uh that was the one of the subjects of The Wizard, the movie The Wizard with Fred Savage.
SPEAKER_00I saw that. Also, uh at that time, uh right around 1984, uh there was a t television show called That's Incredible.
SPEAKER_04That's Incredible was the other one, yes.
SPEAKER_00I my parents and I watched almost I'm pretty sure why we watched every single episode. I asked one of the things Jackie and I talked about earlier today. Um, there's a lot of neat stuff, but it was kind of like a uh televised freak show in in some aspects. Uh, like there was one guy that stuffed himself into a uh uh plexiglass box that was like one foot by one foot or something like that.
SPEAKER_04Oh okay. So it was almost like a uh uh what about it or whatever that was that one uh show was where it's just kind of kooky.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and well, like one of the ones that stuck in my brain was there was uh someone that created a car to drive cross country non-stop. So they built a special device to raise up the wheels so that they could change the wheel while they were driving or change out of tire while they were driving. Uh they had special trucks come up alongside it to refuel while they were driving. Um, but they had a uh uh at the time video games were new, so it's like okay, we'll get a lot of eyes on this, and the young kids will feel validated and they can show their parents. And uh, you know, some younger parents are like, oh, well, you know, it's not just a kid thing. I could play this too.
SPEAKER_01Uh fun fun fact about that's incredible. Uh Tiger Woods was on it in 1980 as five at a five year old uh showing off his putting skills.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_04He had that little baby fist bump going.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, and like stuff even Someone uh catching a bullet with their teeth. That you know, that kind of oddity, oddities and interesting things and and stuff, but yeah, it was definitely a staple of my family's uh TV schedule.
SPEAKER_04I I love that like I love that before YouTube we had to put that on a show. I have to go and look for freaks with weird abilities and stuff like that now, like by hand if I want to. And like it's lovely that there was at one point it was just like a like I don't know, here's some video games. That's new. Let's put that on the screen. All right, well, here's a guy who can stuff himself into a suitcase. Let's put that on the screen, you know. And it this is all the same show, you know.
SPEAKER_00Uh, also, like um, the the voice of uh micro machines. I don't know if ever anyone remembers them, but there was matchbox cars, and then they made even smaller little cars that children could swallow and choke on uh called micro machines. And for because they were so small and they went really fast, uh, they got the world's fastest talker to do the commercials for it. And that guy was introduced to the world on That's Incredible. So that's incredible king had a lot of a lot of big stars before they were stars, and uh it's one of those ones where if you watch back, you're like, Oh my goodness, okay.
SPEAKER_01He was able to talk 586 words per minute. Holy shit, and was the world record for a while, but somebody in 1990 uh broke his record with 637 words per minute, and then another person broke it in 1995 at 655, and as far as I can tell, that's the that's where we're at, and that's cocaine.
SPEAKER_04Um oh, and uh here we are, guys. It's 1983 to 1985, the video game crash. Um so Atari was basically like like we said, we're they were just trying to get that money, get that money, get that money. And part of that was they didn't want to slow down the the process of of people making games and thereby, I guess, maybe uh selling buying royalties for like the the the manufacturing or something for the carts. Um I don't know how their deals worked uh necessarily, but uh there was no quality control. And so the market was getting inundated with physical uh just trash video games, uh, including everybody's favorite game of all time, uh ET, the extraterrestrial, based on the hit 1982 Spielberg movie. Um a little bit of backstory about that. They were contracted to have this game come out roughly, I think, with the release uh of the movie or the release of maybe it was the uh the home video one. Um, but anyway, they were not given enough time. I think I believe that the f that the the statistic is they were given eight weeks to make uh a video game based on ET. And gosh darn it, they tried. Uh if you have never seen video of E.T. the the Atari for the Atari 2600 being played, uh you will not get more information about how to play it or what it is by watching a video of it or playing it. Uh it's it's a nonsense game about falling into holes and then using E.T.'s neck extension power to fly back up out of the hole. Uh there it was unclear what the rules were. Anyway, they overprinted by millions of copies uh uh this this this game that nobody wanted. As soon, I mean, word of mouth is everything in this day and age, and once people figured out that this was not just a stinker, but like barely functioning, uh they like companies couldn't get rid of these things. And it was it wasn't just ET, it was all is the Pac-Man um port, uh, which is like Pac-Man is uh a beautiful game uh by comparison. But the 2600 one is like it, it's just they should not have it. I I would it's like when you uh take you should take the F. You should just like this is not gonna work, uh, and you should have known it wasn't gonna work. Um anyway, they ended up making so many of these cartridges that didn't get sold that they were literally taken out to the Nevada desert and buried uh in like concrete sarcophagi, like some kind of fucking evil prophecy. Uh the figures though on the industry, so at night in 1982, the sales for the industry were 3.2 billion in 1982. Money they were in the 3 billion range. Uh in 1985, they had dropped to 100 million. Uh that sounds the night the the other number sound kind of sounds bigger, so I'll help you out there. That is a 97% drop uh in the revenue for that industry in sales.
SPEAKER_00And um it that was around the time like uh I know my parents uh were sold on the Magnavox Odyssey 2. Uh my neighbor down the street had an Intellivision, and my friend, another friend of mine had the Coleco, and the Coleco had the best most I could never play it because my ADHD couldn't remember what all the buttons did, but it came with a special controller for baseball where you had a joystick and you had four buttons to select first base, second base, third base, and and home, and it had a little uh uh kind of a roller um uh a roller wheel. So whenever you were trying to run to the base, you would press where you wanted to go and just spin that wheel like crazy, and it was awesome. Uh I just couldn't I kept pushing the wrong button and running the wrong way. Uh but yeah, it was like Atari had a lock, and then all of a sudden they had competition, and they were putting out crap, so like they were being attacked essentially in a metaphorical sense, they were being attacked on all sides at once. Uh less people were buying, more competition. All the stuff they're putting out is crap, so it's like uh-oh. And we're really fall.
SPEAKER_04We're really talking about like like we've been talking for a minute. This is not a lot of time. This is maybe a decade, decade and a half that that that these things are even on the scene. They are a they're an investment. They're they're an investment. They're they I think like Pong was something like $700, and I think that's like not adjusted. I think it was like $700. Yeah, and the game on it was Pong. That's it. That's all you got was Pong. So like there wasn't like switching out cartridges even. So it this what had not been around long, and then we're starting to get to the switchable cartridges, and then there are too many, and 85 hits and or you know, 1983 hits, and people are like, Okay, that was uh neat fad Pac-Man fever. We had our day in the sun, and now it's time to set childish things aside and move on to whatever the next big uh uh technology is, uh, which was leg warmers, I think, and uh and side ponytails, and cabbage cats, yeah, cabbage crash kids. And then in 1985, out of the west, here comes uh not out of the west. That was my Lord of the Rings reference, it's the opposite direction. Out of the out of the east on a shining horse comes a little company called Nintendo, uh, which had been making little like playing cards and stuff like that. And then they came out with something called the Famicom or the Family Computer. And you'll notice that they didn't call it the Nintendo Gaming Machine, they called it the Family Computer, uh, because they they saw that this they were like, This no, this technology is good, this is solid, we had it. We just need to not we need to quality control it, and we need to uh not for a while, we need to not call it a game. We need to be a little we need to we're gonna we're gonna button it up, we're gonna mask it by calling it the the either the Famicom in the East or the the Nintendo Entertainment S.
SPEAKER_00Uh and at this time uh uh Japan as a whole, they're like across the board, every single industry that they were involved in was on a wave of quality control because uh they the 70s uh Japanese cars in the 70s were like, oh, only poor people can get those. But then it became a oh, we're gonna make them to last and put them up against German cars. German cars are great, are great machines, but they need a lot of attention, a lot of maintenance. We're gonna build it with that. Uh, you don't need to take care of it, you just drive it. It's and it and we'll do the quality control to make it last. The televisions, all the electronics coming out of it, all the toys coming out of Japan. They were on a uh peak of quality control at this time.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I think also there was like this element of uh I think this is when you started to see in in really in the culture of Japan, I think it had probably been around since the 70s, but the salary man, the the the the very the stereotypical, like extremely hardworking Japanese man, uh, you know, spending 12, 14 hours a day at work, uh, you know, like and then that includes going out and drinking with your boss, which is like very important culturally over there. Uh so like you're not getting home until like one in the morning, uh to sleep for four hours, get up and go do and it was like this is like if you're an accountant, you know, like this is they just they're very hardcore, uh especially around this time about work. And so you can't be an honorable, upstanding member of Japanese society and then also go and play the Nintendo Game Box, you know. You can't, so you know, you have the Famicom. Uh and I just I love that they that they they also, by the way, they would they would later uh literally four salarymen. They they on the job, they invented Gunpei Yokoi invented the first uh predecessor to what would become the Game Boy, the game and watch. And it was this little uh L E D or L C D uh thing that was it was a game, and then it would flip into like being a clock and a calculator that you would put in your breast pocket. And and that was the idea was just to let salary men have a little fun. Like you gotta give it to them for kind of trying to crack the the tougher nuts of of like the Japanese market. Uh it's it's beautiful. Uh and it led to the you know a huge paradigm shift, but that's another podcast, I think. Um so the NES is a huge hit. Uh it's a huge, huge, huge thing. Uh home consoles, uh you know, everybody and their brother is getting one of these. Uh Super Mario Brothers is blowing everybody's mind. Uh just the idea that now you it if the last thing you saw was ET for the 2600 and Pac-Man for the 2600, and then you sat down and you played Super Mario Bros., it's gonna blow you away. It's so colorful. There's so many things in it. There's like I in five minutes, I was like, I ate a mushroom, I got big, I stomped on a brown mushroom, I got killed by a turtle. Uh, there's so much things happening, the music, everybody's they're they're firing on, they come out of the gate firing on all cylinders, and they have the Nintendo Seal of Quality to help them control what does and doesn't get released. They do so well that you know, obviously, there's more um sequels to to Super Mario Bros. including Super Mario Bros. 3, and that was what the wizard was ultimately kind of a commercial for.
SPEAKER_01And the power glove.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and the power glove, which uh it's funny, they god love them. They tried. I don't know what they were thinking.
SPEAKER_01Have you tried to play Super Mario Brothers in any of its iterations, like in the last few years, like as a grown-up?
SPEAKER_04I I am addicted to like this. There is something like ancestral to me about the sound and music of the original Super Mario Bros. So I I will go back to it from time to time, and I think I've played it within the last year for sure. Um, it's a fucking hard game.
SPEAKER_01It is. I tried playing it like last month one time, and I was like, This is not for me. And I remember sitting there for like hours playing it when I was a kid, and it's hard.
SPEAKER_04Running, running so fast and like getting the jumping down so perfectly that like for most of the level you're actually facing you're facing backwards because you can run at top speed, but you you it's like putting your foot against the brake pedal so that when you hit like a small platform, you just sort of tap the button and bounce off, and you don't have like you don't overshoot, you know. You can kind of just yeah. And now I'm playing this game and I'm like, did I have an accident that I'm not that I'm not that I'm not that I don't remember, you know. It's just that and that's also a thing is like, I mean, this this is very much uh, especially when it comes to these Twitch games, this is kind of a young man's game. The reflexes don't hold up uh from for a lot of people over over time, and so you know it naturally cycles uh you know people that are just kind of losing that that mile and sheath or whatever makes you faster at video games uh what that have they already done. Uh you age out, uh apparently. I've never tried to be competitive, so I don't I'm this is all a new world to me.
SPEAKER_00Um to put another wedge in this, uh, right around this time, right around the time that the Nintendo uh entertainment system is coming out, uh track and field hit arcades. And track and field track and field was one of the big games in the early competitive, what would be like the great great grandfather of esports. Uh, but their their thing, like Space Invaders put the high score on the top and said, Hey, go ahead and beat this. And other games came along and they had the list. Here's the top 10. So if you didn't get the top score, you tried to get it, you know, try to fill out the top 10. What track and field did is they had an overall top score, but then they had all these events inside where you could try to get your name on the top score for those individual events, so it became incredibly addictive. And also with what it was coming out in the arcade, Nintendo was able to bring that into the home as well. So, you know, it's not only oh, I I'm you know, mom and dad, I'm spending five dollars every time we go to the mall on this. Why don't we go ahead and buy a Nintendo and bring it home? So you know it was a boost on both, you know, attack from all attack from all sides kind of thing.
SPEAKER_04And then of course, if you bought the uh the track and field NES version, you got the predecessor to the Dance Dance Revolution dance mat made of uh the thinnest foam that China could possibly manufacture. Uh and it just had a two huge button because uh track and field is uh I'm largely pressing the A button and the B button in various patterns as quickly as you can to do whatever it is you need. Uh so the idea was we would get these kids uh up and up and about while playing their video games, just mashing on these giant A and B buttons on the on the floor. Uh, and it did not work. Uh was the it just did not work the way they wanted it to. Um, so this this all uh you know Nintendo comes out strong with the very famous the 1990 Nintendo World Championship. Uh this was uh competition competition in 29 cities. Uh city winners got uh $250 in a trip for two to the world finals at Universal Studios Hollywood, Orlando Reppers. Oh, never mind. Sorry, I was thinking of Hollywood Studios Orlando, not Universal Studios Hollywood. Anyway, Orlando Represent though, anyway, just cuz uh Gabe's that uh the what they what they played was so they played Mario Bros. They played Rad Racer, and they played Tetris. And it was 50 coins in Mario, you had to get 50 coins in Mario Bros. You had to uh win a rad racer custom course, and then you played Tetris until the time ran out. And then they had like some Kakamami equation Super Mario Bros. plus rad racer times 10 plus Tetris times 25. Uh that was your score, which they bracketed or they they they split into 11 and under, 12 to 27, or wait, that's wrong. That's definitely wrong. 12 to 17 is what that's supposed to say, and uh, and then 18 and over. Uh and I guess I don't know who won what, but here are the prizes: $10,000. I like to think that's probably for the kids. Uh, a 1990 Geo Metro automobile, uh, or a 40-inch rear projection TV.
SPEAKER_01Oh, behemoth.
SPEAKER_04Uh like I I saw that and my back hurt. I literally like when I read that. I was just like, that had to have been 4,700 pounds.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it had to be so huge.
SPEAKER_04Um, so like the ideas in the air that you can compete in these, but keep in mind, this is all still, this is not people playing against each other, this is people playing runs in games by themselves and comparing. And then a little game called Street Fighter 2 hit the scene. Everybody asks, where's Street Fighter 1? Don't worry about it. It's a different kind of game. It's like a the Virgin of Street Fighter is kind of like a uh a beat-em-up, it's just a belt scroller. Um, but Street Fighter 2 introduced this idea of two people being on the screen at the same time with their life bars, which I think there might have been a score as well. But the real main event was you could see how much you know life you had left uh before the other guy officially kicked the crap out of you. And this like lit the arcade scene on fire in the home scene when it got home ports. Um, this is where you started to hear people talk about like, you know, is this an arcade perfect port? Basically saying, like, taking it seriously enough that I don't want to play the console version if it's not as quick and as responsive as the like bigger, more physical, more dedicated uh chip in the in the arcade game. Um, and so that was like a big split there for for a while. And then also Mortal Kombat would come a year later.
SPEAKER_00Um I was actually I was actually like my Friday nights, my parents would drop me off at the mall, and I would take my weekly allowance or whatever that money they gave me, and I went to the arcade, and the the the weekend that I walked in there, and they had one of the big ones where like they had a giant screen TV so everyone in the arcade could watch it. And they had the two two separate pants. Like, if you can imagine uh a stand-up arcade game with the the joystick deck and stuff like that, and some versions of it were they kind of expanded the front a little bit and you're side by side, like almost shoulder to shoulder. This was you're standing separated, and you could see, and everyone's lining up to next game, next game, next game. But watching it on this giant screen in the arcade, watching these people fight, it was a beautiful game that no like it came out of nowhere. Like, this is more like the cartoon, even though it was very cartoony, it looked so much better than anything else out there, and it was just like yes, take my money, all of it.
SPEAKER_04Like, so unbelievably like far and away, like it just these huge big sprites jumping around, these colorful characters. Uh, in the case of like Mortal Kombat, you had the the fatalities, which were uh, of course, like caused a lot of controversy, but it it it leaned into what this game was going to be once it hit, which was this you didn't just win, you annihilated the other guy's spine, you know. You you and and they were over the top, and it was funny. And of course, Tipper Gore hates uh laughter, and she uh she got all mad about stuff, and Hillary Clinton as well. Um, I want to say I think it was like it was Nancy Reagan, it was all the like president's wives uh that were that were real upset. Um, and to be fair, because Hillary Clinton was a senator at the time, I think, as well. But um, but they so they were basically like, hey, this shit where like kids are in the thing and they're basically playing like blood sport, they're basically I mean this is awful. This is like saw, you know. Basically, 1992, this was this was horrific. If you were a grandma, especially, uh, or a sitting United States Senator and you needed something to yell about. But in fairness, yeah, okay, what's the where's the brakes on this thing? And so they said, you do something about it, or we will. And the industry got together and created the ESRB as a result of that controversy. Um, so now we have a we have a rating system, we're starting to get more codified in the industry at large, um, which is Funny because we invented the ESRB, or they they came they pulled that together to get the ratings on games to see who could play what. And here comes uh a little game called Doom in that uh 1993, uh a game about running down a corridor and uh blasting people away with realistic ish for the time weapons. Yep.
SPEAKER_01Um great was Doom the original backrooms.
SPEAKER_04You know, okay, it's funny that you say that because I'm a big backrooms and liminal space guy, and I want to say that that actually comes from playing Doom at six years old on my like cousin's computer. And I what I what I had I there's a bunch of like launch options, and I didn't know what they did, so I just flipped them all on because I was a stupid kid and I didn't care to read what they meant. And what I did was I turned on uh like god mode and no monsters, and what I accidentally made was basically the backrooms because Doom without the the monsters is you just like walking through hallways with creepy music trying to find keys to doors. And I remember like it gave me such a specific like that I that I went searching for for years in other in other like single player like shooters, uh that feeling of like weird lost loneliness, which is not what Doom is. I was dumb and I turned on these options that made it a different game. Uh and I I just think it's funny because yeah, years later the backrooms comes, and I'm like, ooh, what's this feeling? Ah, it's that it's the Doom feeling coming back. Uh but but Doom was Doom was interesting because Doom kind of like made I think there were games before that that you could link over the internet. Um, but Doom made it easier. Doom made it very easy to the point where uh everybody in their dad who had Doom, who had an internet connection, who could afford whatever those rates were back in 1993, uh you know, people were connecting to whatever the the they were opening up port 666 and they were they were doing whatever they could to to experience the novelty of like uh shooting another person, like a who's not who's over there somewhere in cyberspace, like they're a real person on the other end of a computer. Yeah, uh this was this was mind-blowing. And so began this. Is where I think the real esports, when we talk about like teams and leagues, and are we getting uniforms yet? This is kind of the turning point because in 1997 there's a lot of stuff that kind of happens that's not really. I mean, uh, I think they start to they'll do Street Fighter holds competitions, uh, Mortal Kombat, I think had some stuff. These are all more like corporate events that are trying to promote games. Yeah, um, and they are they are competitions in their own right, but there's nothing like huge and uh and all-encompassing until you get QuakeCon.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_04Um and QuakeCon was Quake was this very it was the it was the the the successor to Doom in the multiplayer component. It was fast, it was 3D, which people love. That was like new, you know. Um, and it was just I mean, looking at people playing Quake or Quake 3, especially back in the day, is how do you have the reaction time? I am oh yeah, this is this is honestly where I start to go, I can't parse what I'm even seeing right now. Uh I can kind of understand that you got fragged or fragged somebody, but like it's just so fast.
SPEAKER_00Like my brain never got as uh as DW at all, like the control and stuff and all that stuff. And it spawned an entire like when Quake hit, it was literally a quake across multiple industries because uh not only did people uh start creating new computers that they could carry around, and um you know they started selling switches and and route routers more than they'd ever sold before. Uh LAN uh LAN cafes started popping up everywhere, like specifically, like hey, we've got Quake and you can play on our computers and all this other stuff. Special mouses came out, special keyboards came out. Like I know there other games inspired that, but Quake really like just devastated the world with that.
SPEAKER_04And for the for the the the the children, the tiny tiny babies who have wandered into wherever this is playing right now, uh looking for their dad, uh a land party, a land like you had these these were not online things yet. QuakeCon was you unhooked your computer from the wall and you put it in hopefully some kind of cushioned bag, and you came out to like uh I think it was Texas, I think it's always been Texas because that's where ID's based. Yeah uh and you got into this like big but crowded room with what I think must have not been very good AC with all these computers running. Uh, if you go and you look up old cut uh uh images of Quake Cod, lots of lots of gentlemen just uh foregoing the shirt. Uh and it's it's clearly very hot. These are not men who are proud of that, they're just like, I can't do it, I gotta not have a shirt.
SPEAKER_01Do we think it was like a room full of sweaty bobbies?
SPEAKER_00It was a lot of sweaty bobbies, it was fresh. But and and like it taught an entire generation of mostly Gen X guys, uh and a few Gen X females how to mod and upgrade computers because before then it was like, Oh, I need this, and you know, take it to the store and have the nerd behind the desk do it. But it's like, screw that, I've got a tournament this weekend. How do I do this?
SPEAKER_04Uh yeah, and people have awesome like computers, like custom-built computers and like crazy cases that they've built themselves.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, not only advancing the router industry and the LAN uh cafe industry, but like educating an entire generation of people real quick on how to do it.
SPEAKER_04And it's funny because it's like uh it's it's that you almost feel like this FOMO, which turns into like a necessity, and that's how you learn this this new thing, this new skill. Now you know how to network a computer to like uh a network, you know, you like you know, and that was not that was not like going over to the bottom of a screen of the thing, god I'm old, but like going over the the the system tray in the corner and going like okay, connect to Wi-Fi. It was uh big deal. The internet screamed at us like an angry carp. Um and and it it it ate phone uh phone juice. You couldn't do phone at the same time. It was a it was a wild era, um, very cowboy. Um, and QuakeCon 1997. This is where we get. Can I drop this in the chat? Please, no. Um this is where we get the Cyber Athlete Professional League. Uh and this is where you you actually see an effort made to kind of centralize um obviously it was Quake focused. I'm sure they had bigger, bigger aspirations, but they wanted to kind of codify and get people together in teams uh to uh uh uh play these games. And they their their logo is the MLB logo, like but with the gamer on it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I see it.
SPEAKER_04Um it's it's pretty great. It's it's very like I love that even this guy is wearing a t-shirt. Like that's just very funny. You can tell that he's wearing a t-shirt in the in the logo. Uh that's just I don't know why that's so funny. Um, yeah, and so they I think that at this point you start to see this really kind of work in the background because it's happening, but people aren't they're not interested in this. I don't think that it's you know, it's it takes a while for people to be able to watch first-person shooters. I think it takes people playing uh the generation that played first-person shooters a lot growing up to enjoy watching other people play it and be able to to actually parse the information happening on screen.
SPEAKER_00Um can you share what I uh down at the bottom? I added the logo. Can you see it? Uh yes on yours on your screen.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, oh, there we go. Yes, beautiful. Uh, glorious. Like a real a real professional. Uh, I mean, there's there's a hint of like bravado here, gamer bravado, but with the guy kind of yelling and shouting and the fist up. But uh there is like to be fair, if it showed a guy like with uh with stank face just focusing really hard, not moving at the computer, that would be very dynamic. I understand why they went with this instead. Um so it's it's a I think it's a good logo for what it's trying to accomplish. It's trying to get you hype about watching people play uh, in this case, Quake and possibly other games. Um, but two years later in 1999, we would see two things happen. Um and that is the release of StarCraft, and that's the release of Counter Strike, which was a mod for Half-Life. Uh, both of these games took off in different markets, but the big one, Counter-Strike was huge, but the big one was the Korean StarCraft League. Starcraft is like a it's called a real-time strategy game. You uh select one or a group of guys, you move them around, you get them to build structures that give you resources, and once you have enough guys, you go and you storm the enemy's base, or whatever the the is appropriate for the map you're on. Um, but it's it mostly boils down to that uh that flow where it's all about trying to figure out what guys to get, what guys are good at what, uh, what the other guy is building. Um, so you know, responding to that, it is nonsense. If as much as like like I said, this is where I start to just not be able to see this at all in a way that I have to have someone commentate on it for me to understand what's happening. Um, there's so much going on, and there's so many actions to be taken at a given point in time, and this just blows up in South Korea. Uh, and in South Korea, they found the Korean Esports Um Association or Kespa. And this like leads to kind of like this almost becomes a meme where uh South Koreans are like the kind of unequivocal champions of of video games. And I think it had to do with like there was some economic troubles in in South Korea, and uh lots of people were it was it was almost like the when I I didn't kind of get what the precipitating cause was, but it it felt very pandemic-y, like a lot of people ended up being at home with nothing to do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was it was uh basically uh the a all all the Asian markets crashed at kind of the same time, but and South Korea had been fingers in a lot of puddles, and all those puddles dried up, so a lot of people were out of work and sitting at home and bored. Uh, and if they didn't have internet at home, then they went to PC Bangs, uh, which are basically internet cafes. And you know, it was still cheap enough because they didn't the the cafes wanted to stay in business, so they had to lower their price because no one was gonna pay the the price as it was, so everyone's just hanging out there waiting for the market to come back.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and um and and Starcraft, I mean this was this became a household thing. This became this this was uh this would be on TV, like regular ass TV is you could flip the channel and you could see a guy you know, one guy's controlling a bunch of bugs, one guy's controlling a bunch of space aliens, and them going at it and having like like actual like sports commentators, you know, explaining what's happening and getting excited about like things that are happening. Oh, like and they're they they became like kind of legendary for that. I think that's why they call them they they started to call them shoutcasters, they might have just gone back to like announcers or commentators, but early Twitch type stuff, you could be a shout caster, and I think that came from their books.
SPEAKER_01Shoutcaster is accurate based on anything that we watched this morning.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_04It is like every like all I see is a bunch of uh pixels blowing up and changing color and stuff, and some guys telling me how exciting it is, and I'm like, okay, like like I'm I'm gonna yes, and that's kind of I think the that is like I think the mental block for a lot of people is that you have to have it explained to you even as you're watching it, and it's just like a lot of information to to come at you at once. Yeah, so it's not like football where you can kind of watch like oh there's the ball, and now that guy has it. Now that guy has it, now they're at the other end. Easy, like big shapes, big, big, easy goals to see visually, you know.
SPEAKER_00That's the reason why we had to why why Fox had to light up the hockey puck because it's moving so fast, and as soon as you find the puck, it's gone, and you're the camera hasn't moved, and it's still watching these two guys fuddle around and on one side of the ice, and then all of a sudden it shifts, and now you have to find the puck again, and then it moves, and you have to find the puck again. And that's why you know hockey had such a trouble getting, you know, for a great many people, it was like, nah, that's that's not my thing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. That's interesting that that like a little change like that can improve your viewership, it like bringing it to the people, you know, yeah. Because like hockey is a hockey is as valid a game as basketball or football or soccer or anything, you know. It's it's essentially, I mean, it's soccer on ice with sticks, really, you know, at the end of the day. Um, but it's it's huge culture in like Canada and stuff, and they're used to probably losing that puck and picking it up later downstream. Uh, and that's just how you watch hockey, you know, and then they have the fights to uh to really you know to entertain you on the side, I guess. Um but yeah, once you light that up, now it's like, okay, now I can understand this. Uh I can see this sport for what it is a little bit better. Um and from StarCraft uh came this this weird little they made they had custom maps, and the custom maps would you could kind of you could script your own stuff. So you were basically making like a little game, and there was a little one called I think it's uh Eon of the of the Ages or something. And what it was was it was this it was just a base defense thing, but you picked one guy and you had to defend the base with the one guy, and the guy had abilities. That turned into a couple years later, or a year later, in another game that that same company made, uh Warcraft 3, which had better tools, and out of that they created this thing called Dawn of the Ancients, um, which is just you pick they would pull sprites from like everywhere, uh images of characters and different spells and stuff from the game, and they would remix them so that each one of those was a little hero character. Uh and you had to, it was like you know, three uh three guys on one side, three guys on the other, and there would be little minions, and it was this complicated little base defense thing that within this frame of like a um almost like an RPG, almost like playing Diablo or or or or an MMO like World of Warcraft, even though it was before that, yeah. Um, in an arena type thing. So again, they limit it to this like easy win condition, and the the map was always the same, it was just these three lanes and whatever. Um, and that was this big thing, and then you know, gaming kind of went on and it went underground, but people kept playing it for years and years and years. Um, and other stuff happened. Those will come back later. Those, so that little thing is effectively the reason we're having this conversation. Um, but I do want to say that like we're also watching a lot of stuff happen. Um, you know, Counter-Strike has its own big uh companies are starting to catch on. We should have competitions, we should televise those competitions. We're gonna make money, we're gonna get excitement, we're gonna be hype, we're gonna get uh, you know, in keeping with the misogynist theme. We're gonna get hot ladies to uh make sure that the men don't get uh, you know, when there's not games on screen, here's some boobies for you, you know, kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00Um kind of like ESPN. Now we have G4 uh talking about the games.
SPEAKER_04We have G4. Uh yes.
SPEAKER_01And isn't that where Olivia Munn got started?
SPEAKER_04Yes, it is. Um, and uh it was really weird when I started seeing her in real movies, and I was like, oh, the uh uh attack on the show lady uh is doing real stuff uh now. But but uh Evo, the big fighting game championship, which is like its own thing, it has a bunch of other just it they just love fighting games. That started in 2002. I think around this time we start to see G4 come out, and then they have Arena, which I was watching just before I turned uh I got online with you guys. And I gotta say, I'm sorry to everybody about gamers between the years like now and 2002, because this is a show hosted by Will Wheaton and a somehow even more annoying man. Uh I don't know how you guys feel about Will Wheaton. I've I under I've Wesley Crusher has grown on me from Star Trek, but everything he's just I don't like him. He's too he's tried to do a Bob Costas impression and God love him, but it's also like it's G4, so they're clearly being directed to be to make like dumb jokes. So it ends up if I don't know if you guys ever watch Most Extreme Challenge where they dub over physical game shows. Uh but it it it sounds like us doing that, but it's just not dubbed, it's just live. So there's just like a lot of like uh like oh your mom and like a just dumb, like fratty, uh dumb humor. Um, but that was like, I mean, that if if you are listening to this podcast uh and you had uh that level of cable, that was probably the only way you were going to stumble across someone playing video games televised. That was it was still very under underground. Um and in in with the uniforms, where we're at in uniform world is we are at matching t-shirts and or hoodies. We're still keeping it punk, but we did get a screen printer to get us these uh you know these shirts with uh uh an image of a skull and a controller on them to let you know we mean business. Um, and of course the the South Koreans are kind of evolving. They they had a much more codified thing, but I think it's all t-shirts still. Uh you start to see a little bit, the t-shirts start to get little corporate uh logos, you know, like a like a stock car racer. You start to see that a little bit. You know, you start to see the shirt will have like it's not just uh you know the dragons, you know, it's the dragons that over here on the thing, it's like uh NVIDIA, you know, phys X.
SPEAKER_01Uh almost like a Little League soccer kit at the end of it.
SPEAKER_04They I I feel like for a long time the right companies were try were were capitalizing on their right demographics, and then um gaming there's there's this there's this moment where gaming suddenly flipped, and I think it might be Twitch, where the ease of showing people the game you were playing uh became like a uh you know three-button process. Now the cameras are in the in the computers or they're very cheap. Um internet is fast now, so we can all we can multiplayer game and I can stream a video of that multiplayer game to you at the same roughly the same speed, um, you know, quality notwithstanding. But um I I think that that's when it happened because you Twitch comes out and kind of revolutionizes like content, really, in a way. Yeah, um this is where like people start to just watch people playing video games. It they don't have to be competitive video games, it could just be somebody playing Animal Crossing and uh and a person's like, oh that's pleasant. I'll just watch that and chat with this with this uh game game person. Um so you also see like a democratization of televised gaming, but of course the big companies are like, we are going to also get our we're definitely gonna like have our official stuff on here. And so in 2011, that little map game, that that little custom game from StarCraft from over you know a decade prior, uh blets a it splits off into two things, and those are League of Legends and a game called Dota 2. Um, because like the guys who made it went to different companies, and and one of them founded this company, and one of them went to work with Valve, the people that run Steam. Um, and they each had this version of that game. Uh that three lane game where you defend the base. Uh and that That just I it's so strange because it's such a complicated game, but it it hits this neat, it hits this groove right at that time where I guess people just wanted that. They were ready for competition, they were ready to like you know, they had seen like YouTubers blow up, and so now here's this real opportunity to like be a famous person from being good at a video game in a very in a very real way. Um, and so that's when you get these super tournaments for for League of Legends and for Dota 2. These are huge, they rent out stadiums because they have so much money from like their business models with these games that they can afford to drop millions of dollars just on the event. And the prizes for these in um these these are still running. Uh so like in 2017, that was the last date I had uh on on the little thing that I was doing. It they gave out a $1.8 million prize for the winning, it would be a team uh of people that work together because it's a team, it's team, team versus team. Yeah, it it's uh this looks like the floor of the Senate in fucking Star Wars. This is insane.
SPEAKER_01That's crazy.
SPEAKER_04Uh like from a from a sweaty room in Texas to like giant screens and platforms and stuff.
SPEAKER_00And this is a this is still early on. The picture I have posted is still early on, and because later on they go, they lift the the box where everyone all the players are, so you the players become more visible uh and above the crowd, kind of thing. Like the some of the videos we watch today, they're in a plexiglass box up on up lifted up in the air playing this game. It's just all like there's 40,000 people in this arena watching a video game.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and and this is like when you start to get your uh kind of racing stripes and your athletic, um, like moisture-wicking sports shirts. The this is where we kind of start to get the uniform, which is uh it's kind of a golf shirt affair, you know. Uh it's it's funny because there is this turning point where it's like, okay, I when I was watching Arena, Arena is is dumb. Uh, it's great if you want to take a trip down that particular memory lane. It was very nostalgic for me. Um, but it's so funny because they introduce like teams and it'll be like four or five guys a team, and they are guys. Like they are, they are like when you say, Oh, I played games with like a group of my buddies, this is exactly what that looks like. None of these people are you know ready for prime time. Uh, one in like three guys has a bad goatee. Uh, it's it's joyous, it's wonderful. Uh, it's a great, it's a great time to be alive uh in this, minus the minus the Will Wheaton. Uh your taste, your taste depending. But yeah, no, this is so so Lee League gave out a or Riot gave out a $1.8 million dollar prize. I just have to make sure that my figure is correct here because it navigated away, which is super cool. Uh the Dota 2, so League of Legends is its own company, they only make this one game. Uh, they've they branched out and they've done smart things to to kind of get people interested in spending money. You buy characters, you do you buy cosmetics, uh like skins for the characters to make them look unique. You know, you make your ice phoenix look like an American bald eagle, like that kind of thing. And people will drop that they they figured out, you know, people will drop, you know, five, six bucks to to make a guy look different. Um and they've made maybe million, like definitely millions at least, of money off of off of that, possibly billions of dollars off of off of that small thing. And uh uh but Valve, the the company, the opposing company with this other tournament, they are how you buy games on a computer. That's that's their stock and trade. So they have the entire PC gaming pretty much industry's money. And they dropped 11 million dollars on the winners of this international tournament. Uh for this for this like base uh strategy game thing that's based on a on a free map from uh from Warcraft 3 or StarCraft, depending on how you want to argue it. Like that little thing became this multi-million dollar people are wearing uniforms, people are like I wish I could find it. I I see it so clearly in my mind, and I wish I had screenshot it and put it into my into my cloud. But just the image of the guy who looks like he like draws comics for a living, you know, he looks like like Todd McFarland, just just like a skinny dweeb with a bad goatee, as one and three of them have, wearing like a really super trim, like you know, athletic yellow and and black, like he's about to go play soccer, you know. He's a little thinner than you would think based on his head, you know, and he's like crossing his arms and he's going like, I don't get tilted, you know. And I had to like look up what tilted means. Because it's like they're they're appealing to the people that are that are already like gonna watch this. They're they're kind of like you know, tilted is like you you start doing poorly and then you keep doing poorly. Uh and like I didn't know I didn't know any of these terms like sweaty, they have lingo. Uh oh yeah, of course they do, and and each game also has its own lingo. So like it's never been more watched than it is right now, but there is still, as you guys saw when you were trying to look it up, there's still like this barrier, you know, depending on the kind of person you are, depending on what you're interested in. And I love video games, but I think the sports aspect, like I see what you did, I don't like sports, you know, just because you put an E on the front, you didn't trick me. Um, I I think that fighting games is like a if you it's none of this is necessary, you know. You can just pick up a game and play it, but if you if you I think the easiest way to see what the hype is all about is to watch a fighting game. I think that's the easiest way to get people into that if you do want to, because there's this clear indicator at the top of like who's winning. It's second to second, you don't need it explained for you. You see the fireball, it connects with the guy, he takes some life damage, eventually, you know, punch, oh, and then he you know falls down, right? And so uh yeah, I just it's weird that it took that long, and it's weird that like this much more complicated uh game, visually complicated game, kind of overtook that and became the de facto because yeah, uh fighting games still it's one guy versus one guy, and those guys just wear whatever. That's not there's no real teams, um, it's personalities, you know. You get like your dead your Daigos and your um fatal oneties and your uh your Sonic Foxes, you know, these and faker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh I guess there's like Ninja for Fortnite, but like yeah, I think that's more of a streaming thing than a competition thing. Obviously, it's like kind of part and parcel, but but I think Ninja became his own identity, uh entity under himself. Um, whereas it's just fascinating that there's these like this is a thing you you could do, they are still paying money for these. Uh that the hype isn't quite over yet.
SPEAKER_00And it's like it's part of hey, uh, this is the amount of money you can make doing this, so kids are trying, you know, kids anywhere from 15 to 32 is trying to scrape by trying to get to that, like, oh, if if this nerd can do it, I can do it. Um, but yeah, like they have uh we watched a couple T uh uh uh Jersey reveals. It's like, oh, the new 2024 jersey for uh what I whatever the big team is, and then they have all this loud dopamine uh music coming out, and it's like like basically if Peggle uh like Peggle was they you push a button and you have no control over the game, but it's like just this rush of dopamine, and then all this celebratory music and all these lights and flashes and stuff, and that's what League of Legends kind of comes off to me. It's like if I play it, I get frustrated, but if I watch it, I can under like if I put in an effort to watch it, I can see where it would just be a dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit because there's just so much action explosion, and then you have the guy screaming at you how exciting it is, and like they pick a guy that you know you finally you figure out who the who the winner is gonna be early on because the the announcer tells you, so you start kind of leaning and cheering for him, and when he wins, you're like, Oh my god, all right, yeah. So yeah, and and it's dopamine and money is makes the world go round.
SPEAKER_01Yep, and people don't know what to do when they don't have either of them.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and you know, I mean, just for me, for me, it's all it's like I watch you you watch a you watch a clip of a guy like uh you know Chun Lee. Chun Lee's the character that has all the she's got those fast kicks, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great clip. This guy has like one sliver, you can't even see the health, and it she has this move that's like 27 kicks in a row, and each of them the other guy has to press a button at the exact there's a six-frame like thing, and he got every single one of them and then and then came back. And it's like you see the holiday in uh convention room like explode, yeah, you know, and it's like this is so good.
SPEAKER_00Uh and I mean I think they equated that moment to when Babe Ruth took his bat and pointed to the the right field wall, and the pitch came in and he hit it over the right field wall, and then the second time he came up and he pointed to where he was gonna hit it, and he hit it the exact thing. He was like, that moment in e sports was just like that roof calling a shot.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. It was just like it was like everybody knew what was happening, and you didn't you didn't really have to have the if you watched it, you would get it, you know, because it's just like holy shit, what what how is he doing that? You know, it's it's uh and it like those those moments are few and far between just because like it is so hard to watch. Um, but I went to uh I went to PAX East and they do this thing called the Omegathon, and it's the end of it is how they close out the the show. And I went twice, and this is what I think I love about this is where I wanted to live in in the realm of competitive video games, and it was this. It was they played a bunch of games kind of off to themselves that you could go watch them if you wanted as part of the convention, you know, you just wander in and see things, right? Um, but the closing night, the thing that closes this convention when you, you know, they're like, all right, everybody go home, is they do this big something. And one year I didn't go this year, it was a claw machine. Uh and then one time, uh, just to maybe bring it back, uh, one time it was Crokinol, the Canadian like physical, like you flip it's like hockey, but you flick it between uh pegs, and so they have like this camera, and they're just like they're commentating on it like this all stuff. But I think my favorite thing I've ever seen is they turned uh a game called um I think it's called Space Team into Oh, I used to I played that with the kids like right at the end of their tenure at the house. It's such a funny thing to turn into like a competitive sport, and so it is they dressed them up in astronaut uniforms and they all came on stage and they they had to basically like whichever team like got out, you know, survive the longest was the winner. And having no knowledge of space team, I didn't even have it was iPad only at that point. It was kind of on its like it was it was riding this wave of hype, and of course they decided to make it the the closer for the show. Uh and keep in mind, these guys have been playing regular games up until this last round, they've been playing other games that they've like practiced for, and then they do a special this is the last thing, and that's the winner, the winner of that is the winner, and it was space team, where it's just they have to get together and uh and communicate uh a shapes, the the the descriptions of shapes to people. And I feel like that was when for me that was like I want the if I were in charge of games, it would be it would just be mostly this. You would have your people will play Madden, people will play League of Legends, people will play the fighting games, but it would be this, it would be getting these like huge dopamine competition, like friendly, fun competitions without like I don't know, there's there's something corporate about the other stuff to me. And this is like taking like ooh, what if we just found something that like nobody thought was competitive and turned it into a sport?
SPEAKER_01The description of Space Team is a game of cooperative shouting, and I think that's perfect.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's it's incredible, and it it can kind of only be a video game, uh, which I've I think is really really neat. Like there's an element where it's like some of these are kind of mirroring what you would, you know. You got your football, you've got your shooting, you know. You're like, well, that's like football and paintball. We have that kind of thing essentially, but you can't really replicate what space team is doing.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it actually started, I think it started out as a card game before game.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's insane. But I think like the video game helps it you don't develop a strategy because it keeps on changing dynamically. Um, but yeah, I just I just that level of like fuck it, kind of you know, uh there's something to be said for people being the greatest of all time in a in a video game, but I think just the idea of competition, uh finding competition in things where there wasn't competition. Uh almost like the old school, where it was like, How high can your score go? Yeah, that was the only competition. So you developed these interesting strategies and stuff. Uh, and now it's kind of it's just very serious, you know. And that's like that's the uniform. I saw the uniforms and I felt like ah man, you know, yeah, yeah. That was kind of like my feeling.
SPEAKER_01I did a little bit of research onto why they even have the uniforms, and apparently some tournaments have dress codes, including proper footwear. Like you can't wear crocs, you can't wear open-toed shoes. Uh and one of the reasons behind having the uniforms, having the dress code is one, they want to prevent illegal sponsors, which is sponsors that aren't upheld by the tournament organizers or whatever. And um uh they want it to look professional, they want it to look like a legitimate event, and that's why the shoes, and also I imagine that all of like the wires and shit everywhere, you want to have proper footwear, and the stink factor.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Gamers are their uh their stuff.
SPEAKER_00So going back to revenue, uh since 2009, League of Legends has made 20 around 25 billion dollars. Jesus 15 billion dollars of that is from selling skins.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's it's it is so uh it's so nutty. It's so nutty how like they they they figured out every kind of part of it to the point now where you do get like you get uh games that are trying to kind of buck those trends. That's like a strategy now for your marketing where you can be like this this can be played offline, yeah. Imagine, you know, or like um, you know, you buy you, you know, you bought they you made the business model could be that you buy the game once and then everything is just a free update, you know. Um but they've they've really the the concept of like the expansion pack is really has been they they found a way to take that and just go, oh, what if like one guy from the expansion pack was like five dollars and then like the map was like twelve dollars, you know, and then we'll sell the whole thing for like you know a discounted price, but still enough to to really hit our margin. And listen, I'm dumb, I've spent way too much money on Steam games. I fell for this trick and continue to fall for this trick. Someone help me. Uh it's so you just the you see it over time. The the it was always corporate because it required a lot of money to even get made. Yeah, but you just see slowly, you know, it was the end result was fun, and then you just start to see the little tendrils of capitalism really get their hooks in you.
SPEAKER_00You know, this is them doing a little bit too much cocaine, a little bit too much cocaine. Like we hit the peak, we had just enough cocaine to get there, and now we've gone too far.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. I I'm yeah, I don't know how we get out of it, but it's funny just because, like, yeah, occasionally you'll get a game that's like, yep, you buy it and you have it. A novel concept of the year of our lord 2026. I love Mortal Kombat, I'm a big fan of Mortal Kombat, and the way that they do the Mortal Kombat games is what's called a live service game. Yeah, uh, and so what that is is it's basically they take in Mortal Kombat, which used to be like here, you boot this up, there's 18 different weirdos. You s you slap uh slap each other around. You want you your buddy picks one, you pick one, you slap each other around for a couple hours, you have some fun, and you and you you're done. And now what they do with this is like it has to always be connected to the internet to even function. Yeah, and it's like these are these are good, these are you have made quality products, like the game that I'm playing is good. And my my biggest fear is that because and all of this is hooked into that competitive, it's hooked into that um always on, always twitch streaming, gamer, gamer, gamer type mentality. Uh, but now maybe in like 10 years, I won't be able to play this Mortal Kombat game because they've shut off the thing that my computer has to phone home and be like, hey, is it okay if he plays Mortal Kombat? And then the server goes, Yeah, sure. And then they turn that server off, and it's never okay for me to play Mortal Kombat again. And it's the capitalism is really really starting to turn back in on itself and it's gonna eat itself in microcosm, at least in this industry, I think. Uh, when people realize that like not only do I not own the thing I bought, I don't have access to it. Yeah, I don't even have access. The at they have revoked the access to it as a result of at legally through their me uh agreeing that I don't own this product, I own the license for it, you know.
SPEAKER_00Um I think that was uh a incredible journey. And uh yeah, it's it is it is about compet using the human nature of competitiveness uh to leverage for capitalist gains. Uh and you know, every single thing, like the NFL, the NBA, uh all you know, all sports go through that sweet spot, and then they start crushing your soul. And like uh, I got to see I watched it with NASCAR, I watched it with video games, I've watched it with television, I've watched it with movies. Uh the the Marvel universe uh hit that sweet spot, and then one too many lines, and and here we go.
SPEAKER_04What about eight years four? Like, no, just stop, just chill, give me a break.
SPEAKER_00So uh excellent job. I thought that that was awesome. That was great. That was actually fun. That was really weird. Definitely a lot more than we knew uh before. And uh uh, I guess what's the next question?
SPEAKER_01Was Woodrow Wilson a bad president? Oh boy.
SPEAKER_04Oh, a history one. All right, Woody.
SPEAKER_01Um I'm mad at him right now, so I'm excited to see this answer.
SPEAKER_04That's probably fair. I'm just gonna guess.
SPEAKER_00How do you feel about McKinley overall?
SPEAKER_01Oh, I fucking love President McKinley. President McKinley and his wife can get it.
SPEAKER_00I don't McKinley wasn't in office long enough to actually do damage.
SPEAKER_01He's got a couple like thumbs down things about him, like war and and and stuff, but he's got a lot of good and the way that he treated his wife and some changes that happened because of the way he treated his wife. Like, uh, one thing before we get out of here, I'll say this. Before President McKinley was president at the state dinners and whatnot in the White House, the men and the women would have to sit separately. His wife Ida was unwell, and he liked to be by her side at all times in case she needed anything. So when he became president and started having the state dinners at the White House, he rearranged a seating pattern so that his wife would be next to her. And in turn, everybody else uh was next to each each their partner. So it like intermingled the the sexes for the first time in the White House at the official dinners, and that enough is is really cool to me.
SPEAKER_04So that was when America began to deteriorate.
SPEAKER_01He looks Wandra Wilson can go fuck himself for all I care right now. I'm so excited to learn more about him. I'm looking at McKilly right now.
SPEAKER_04What a severe looking man. Yeah, I would look I if he was like, I want to sit next to my wife, I'd be like, Yeah, sure.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, the old saying is if you uh you can't be president without being a war criminal. So until next time, I have been Mickey with Jackie and Christian, and thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_01Bye.
SPEAKER_00Goodbye. No, it was nothing.
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