Original subtitles

- You might be under the impression

that this is gonna be a story about nostalgia.

Well, you know, there's a fair bit of that, okay,

but this story, the story of Mystic Searches,

nostalgia's just a prologue.

In order to tell this story,

I'm gonna have to play with the chronology a little bit.

I'm gonna have to dramatize some things.

If that ends up leaving you a little bit confused

or frustrated, well then,

we have adequately represented exactly what it's like

to program for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Let's rewind two years

to when I was visiting my childhood home

in Central New York.

It's rather bittersweet to be reminded

of your humble origins.

I was well aware that this place was a mausoleum

of foregone opportunities

and a road map to a bunch of near misses.

This was a repository of artifacts

of long-abandoned aspirations.

♪ It's amazing how the colors seem to disappear ♪

♪ It seems funny how the wind seems to blow ♪

♪ Through your hair ♪

♪ Come here ♪

♪ For a little while ♪

♪ Your face ♪

♪ I erase ♪

- On the one hand, it was a pleasant reminder

of a simpler time, on the other,

a reminder of once limitless, now expired, potential.

Now before you get the wrong idea that I'm trying

to solicit pity from you, in all fairness,

this is the home that I was returning to.

Okay, so I never became the big rock star.

I never became the famous novelist.

But I really couldn't complain.

I lived in paradise.

Had a nice job with a corner office.

Found the girl.

She's perfect, you know.

Took the vows.

Bought the house in the suburbs,

and just to complete the cliche,

got the cute, little dog.

Life was good.

It was crazy.

There was so many sort of icons

of nostalgia. - Did you see

all the old band stuff?

- All the old band stuff

and CDs--

- And the old films that I've worked on,

and all that stuff is just, you know, a giant pile

in the shed. - Of course.

- There was a surprise.

I found, okay, so I know you're gonna like this,

'cause you're a huge Zelda nerd.

I found all my old NES stuff

with the golden cartridge. - Oh there's a booklet.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Even cooler was right next to it,

I found these old illustrations.

These are illustrations for a video game for the NES

that me and a neighborhood kid had created.

- Yeah, so there's like the items and the weapons,

all the monsters, the names, the characters, like,

as if this was a game manual, you know.

- Yeah.

- What was even crazier was--

Oh, the school pictures.

- My mom had all the school pictures,

like right next to it, in this folder.

And here's 1988.

- Oh my God. - Second-grade,

that's me-- - Look at you.

with the spiky hair. - With the cool, spiky hair.

This is Matt Juliano.

This is the guy that I did all these with.

- You did these drawings with him.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Oh my gosh.

Do you still talk to him?

- He moved away not long after this picture.

I haven't probably talked to him in 20-25 years.

- You should find him.

- Thanks to the significant advances in telecommunications

since the last time I'd seen him,

it only took a search or two on social media

to track him down.

Turned out, we live pretty parallel lives,

both ended up in Florida, both musicians.

It's really exciting to get to catch up with him

over a couple of drinks and a jam session.

It was only a matter of time until the subject

of those game ideas came up.

Do you remember anything?

Do you remember?

- Yeah, I vaguely remember some of the drawings.

I do distinctly remember writing a letter.

- Wasn't it something along the lines

of like send us the stuff, so we can make our own game?

- Yeah, if I remember--

Matt and Joe, age eight or whatever,

like, literally writing it in pencil.

- It was like a blank cartridge

and all the other stuff you need.

I remember your mom kind of looking at us,

and in retrospect, she kind of smirked and was like,

"I could stop these kids' hopes, but I'm not going to.

"We're gonna see how this plays out."

I remember her being very helpful,

like helping us with he postage and all of that.

- So after we sent the letter, every day that summer,

me and Matt, we sat around, and we waited

for the delivery trucks.

Every day, we waited for the mail,

'cause we knew that one of those days,

the space age computers were going to arrive from Nintendo,

and it was gonna help us make our game,

and we were just gonna intrinsically know how to use them.

That didn't happen.

No, we instead got a little form letter,

much like this one.

Basically said stay in school, don't do drugs,

do good in math, and you know, unfortunately,

Nintendo of America cannot take unsolicited game ideas.

How soul crushing, right?

The ideas got indefinitely filed away in the shed

in my backyard, but now 30 years older,

and at least a little wiser, I had to wonder.

What would it take to actually bring this game to life?

Cue Austin Mckinley, production partner,

fellow filmmaker and tremendous illustrator

who actually had experience working in games.

As someone whose creative input I'd come to value,

I was curious.

As an artist, what would he think of trying

to revive a juvenile ambition like this.

I found these illustrations for a game

that I'd created for the Nintendo Entertainment System

when I was like eight years old.

! - Illustrations

and maps of the world--

- Oh, that's awesome. - Levels and descriptions

of characters and all this other stuff.

Would you be interested in embarking on a crazy adventure

to appease my eight-year-old's ambition .

♪ Seeing deception ♪

♪ A half life minus ♪

♪ A segment, a blunder ♪

♪ Objective protection ♪

♪ It's a sexual time ♪

♪ Paid for a product backwards ♪

♪ It's selection time ♪

♪ Final lesson ♪

- I mean, you know, in a very sort of

literal way. - Literal translation,

yeah, yeah.

Even the details, you know, under the trees and--

- Uh-huh, that's really gratifying.

I love the lightning striking the crystal ball.

That seems very eight years old, ppp-choeww!

- It seems like an '80s cartoon.

I mean, it looks like an '80s cartoon.

- For sure.

So I mean, is this the game that you want to make?

Do you want to keep going on this or what?

- It would be cool to see the world realized,

but at the same time, without it actually on a cartridge.

It's almost not worth it, you know.

It's, it's, I don't know.

- Well, now that you actually, probably,

can find all, quote, the stuff you need

to make the game, it's probably doable now, right.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So actually try and make it for a cartridge.

I don't even know where to start with that.

- It's got to be doable.

If you do it, I'll go out and buy an NES right now.

- So what we're talking about is a complete game

for an unfamiliar console, programming our own game engine.

My concern is, on more than one occasion,

I've spent a year of my life building assets

for a game that never ships.

I want to make sure that

if we commit to this, that we have a plan

for how we're gonna take it to completion.

What if we got a team,

a team of professional artists,

modern-day, professional artists,

and force them to retrofit their skills

into something that will fit within the NES constraints?

Could we make a compelling game experience,

despite the limitations?

So we compiled a list of people we knew.

Elizabeth Wilson, published novelist.

Hmm, certainly knows how

to craft a fantasy narrative.

Does she know anything about games, though?

Doubt it.

But it might actually be a good thing,

because she wouldn't fall

into the same gaming narrative tropes

that you or I might.

- You know, we could get Josh Fallon

to maybe help on the hardware side.

- Oh, vagabond coder, that's appropriate.

- Well, you know, I mean, he used to work

on microcontrollers and stuff like that, back in the day.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Does that skill set even translate

to what we're talking about here?

There was Matt,

who was probably the only other person on Earth

who had a creative investment in the project,

plus a lot of friends with a broad array of creative skills.

Together, we were a team of talented

and accomplished creative professionals who,

in this case, had zero idea of what we were doing.

Elizabeth was slightly concerned,

'cause she'd recently found out she was pregnant,

but I assured her we'd be plenty done

by the time the baby came.

And Josh, he was concerned, 'cause he lived pretty far away,

but I told him, you know, we could collaborate remotely.

Matt wasn't sure exactly how he could help,

but I told him I really wanted him involved.

All in all, everyone was legitimately excited.

I was surprised.

But one question kept coming up.

Exactly who was the audience for a game like this?

Okay, take a modern game studio like Bungie,

thousands of employees, millions of dollars

in each project's budget.

They worked on equipment

that looks straight out of science fiction.

They recorded soundtracks with full symphony orchestras.

They created photorealistic experiences

using motion capture.

Now for reference, compare that

to the average independent homebrew studio,

spare bedrooms and dark attics

and unfinished basements and cramped storage units,

and in some cases, cleared-out garages.

How could any developer hope to compete,

and more important, why would they want to?

Well, it turns out there was a whole underground community

that did this, so I asked them.

- Video game industry started out back

in the '70s and the '80s.

It was a bunch of hackers and computer geeks.

The roots of the industry are not any different

than indie development right here and now.

- When I was between eight to about 11,

me and my buddies, on the playground, of course,

we were always throwing around ideas for games.

It's where I first decided I wanted to be a programmer.

It's because I wanted to make games for the NES.

- There was sort of an all-permeating thing, you know.

We'd take manuals on the bus to read,

and so a natural extension of that was just

to start sort of making up our own stuff.

- Back then, you're just drawing it up.

You're just like, "If I ever could do this."

But you never, back then, ever imagined

that you would have been able to.

- In the end, it doesn't matter that it's not

on some kind of app.

It doesn't matter that it's not on the newer-age console.

It doesn't matter that it doesn't reach the masses.

When I'm, like, programming for the Nintendo,

I'm doing it for me.

So I want it on the cartridge, and in the box,

like the Nintendo that we all grew up with.

That's where I want to create.

- 'Cause we grew up playing these games

and remember how much we love them, and we still love them,

and we want to feel like we're part of it

in a really intimate way by actually making a game

for the system we loved so much.

- Okay, if we're going to go to the work

of putting it on the actual system,

there needs to be a reason to do it more than nostalgia.

So there are homebrewers that are doing this,

but is anybody doing it for a larger artistic purpose,

just than because they grew up on that system,

and they loved it?

- There's something to be said about the preservation

of the art of creating these games

that's going to be lost.

We might always have the game,

but we're gonna lose the art of how that game is made.

- I read an article recently where they were discussing,

like, as how do companies preserve

their development history.

And a lot of companies don't.

They throw it all away.

And people may forget, like, how these games were made.

So the homebrew scene kind of reignites that interest

in how these games were made.

Inside of a humble storage unit

in suburban Texas was the home of Piko Interactive,

an independent game studio that specialized

in post-market development for consoles like the NES.

- I was born in a really small region in North Mexico.

Mexico is a very religious country, extremely religious.

Everything was satanic.

You know, oh, Spider-Man, satanic.

Mickey Mouse, satanic.

It was the devil.

And you can see the horns, you know,

all that crazy stuff.

My parents got into a state where, you know,

Zelda, it's a satanic game, and you cannot play it.

And that led into me being banned from playing video games

for like five, six years.

And maybe being banned

from playing those games all those years led him

to what he did now, which was saving lost games.

- There are other games that were developed back

in Nintendo's lifetime, back in the '80s and '90s,

that were canceled,

and they were never commercially released, officially.

So what we do is we find the IP owners,

intellectual property owners, of those games

and then acquire the rights to finally publish them.

There are some games out there, really good games,

that they should have been released.

If we don't look for them, they're gonna be lost forever,

and they're not gonna be able to be appreciated.

Piko Interactive wasn't the only company

developing new NES games with altruistic motives.

- So we released Germ Squashers, this past January,

and raised $5,000 the first month alone

for the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

- And one of the stories that I heard was

about a child who had special needs.

He needs to get injections routinely

because of his disability.

And he was terrified of them.

He was a big fan of old games and stuff.

And he saw Germ Squashers,

and the next time he had to go in for an injection,

he was like all excited,

'cause he had to go get his Germ Squasher,

'cause that's what they used to fight the germs in the game,

which was kind of the idea behind the game,

was to help kids sort of cope

with the idea of having, to get injections

to treat certain illnesses or disabilities.

- So back in the '80s, it took a very specific type

of person to make a game.

They were your mathematicians and engineers.

Today, virtually anybody can make a game,

and because of that, the reasons

for making games have changed.

Anybody who has something they want to share,

they can do that through gaming.

Reasons for creating games had evolved

over the last 30 years.

Take Rachel, college professor and NES homebrew developer.

- When we were younger, we probably weren't thinking

that hard about , about games, in terms of, like,

is this problematic, or is there a little issue with it,

or does this align with my personal values?

Like, I don't think maybe we were always thinking

about that when we were, you know, seven or eight years old.

You know, at the time, I saw the NES as very much

like a boy's toy.

What are, like, the really girly

You've got Barbie.

You've got Dance Aerobics.

And maybe you can say the Little Mermaid, as well.

I think that just about does it.

That's out of a library of 700-plus games.

And not only was Rachel one

of the only female NES programmers I know

to have ever existed, her reasons

for creating NES games went beyond simple entertainment.

- I like showing these works

in sort of, I guess, atypical setups,

maybe in gallery spaces, or I've done a lot of art shows

and things like that.

We can think of the NES game as, not just a game,

but also a cultural artifact.

Take all these sort of artifacts and aesthetic language

from the '80s and '90s that are really associated

with ultra-femininity and then put them on the NES.

And I think when you see those things in stark contrast,

we see how unusual they are together.

You do start asking questions like, "Oh yeah, that is weird.

"I never noticed that video game nostalgia

"and retro game culture doesn't pick up

"on also other '80s and '90s retro stuff

"that was maybe more targeted to girls."

Of course, there were also homebrew developers

whose motivations ran much more parallel to my own.

- Back when I was young,

I definitely liked the Mega Man games a whole lot.

I drew a couple of robot ideas on paper

with colored pencils and pen.

And then I submitted the ideas to Nintendo America.

I'm not very good of an artist, but I thought,

"Well, maybe they can see the conceptual ideas of these."

Nintendo actually looked at it.

They're like, "Oh yeah, thank you for these ideas,

"but no, thank you."

And then they sent them back to me.

- As a storytelling medium, which games have become,

you know, why was this a story that you felt

that you wanted to tell?

- It's just a story about the little guy

is conquering the big guy, so to speak.

- The other thing that I'm wondering,

and this might be a little late in the game

to bring this up, but is just developing

for a console like this, is it even legal?

I mean, if we were developing for Apple or a modern console,

we'd need to have permission and be licensed as--

Maybe I should ask my attorney that ,

before we make an assumption.

And what's funny is even my attorney had a personal anecdote

about the NES.

- My son grew up on this system.

And every day, we'd play Ninja Turtles for hours on end.

That was our ritual.

That was our bonding experience.

When we talked about the game, even at that age,

five, six years old, it was in the context

of how do you make this, how did this thing work,

who designed it and so forth.

And by high school, he was programming.

Today, he's the lead software engineer at Blue Origin

for the BE-3 rocket engine.

- So an interest in the NES led

to your son's future profession,

literally a rocket scientist. - Now he's a rocket,

literally, he's a rocket scientist.

- This post-market development team, is this legal?

Is this something that's acceptable?

- Patent law seems to be not an issue at this point,

because the hardware patents have expired.

But you still have trademark.

You still have copyright issues.

You could have trade secret issues.

So any of those could be a factor in any of this.

- Personal opinion, I mean, is this,

should we pursue this?

Should we do this?

- Personally, it's a great, great, great idea.

Please understand Nintendo is notorious

for going after fan projects.

So tread very, very lightly.

It was true.

We even had friends whose fan projects had been victims

of Nintendo's infamous cease-and-desist order.

Even though we were dealing

with our own intellectual property,

the threat sort of loomed like an ominous shadow.

But even besides potential entanglements

with Nintendo's legal department,

there were pragmatic problems

with bringing this project to life.

- You know, I was thinking,

there's a reason the game companies

stopped manufacturing these things.

Assuming we sell more than 10,

we're gonna have to get these mass produced.

We're gonna have to get them, like, injection-molded,

print the labels, ship whatever this weighs.

That's not gonna be cheap.

We might want to start thinking about crowdfunding.

- So to raise funds, we turned to Kickstarter,

and we set out on a quest

to find other like-minded, eight-bit-loving miscreants.

My first reconnaissance mission was

to The Strong Museum of Play, in Rochester, New York.

They had a complete installation devoted solely

to the 30th anniversary

of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

I was invited down to the archives in the basement.

Now the best way I could describe this place

is the gamer's equivalent of the warehouse

at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know,

antiques and rarities stretching out as far as you could see

in every direction, prototypes and unreleased games,

all collected in the name of preservation.

So do you think, I mean, as a curator for a museum

that collects these relics of video games

and things like that, do you think there's value

in post

Is that something you're interested in preserving?

Is that worth preserving?

- Yeah, if you're telling the long history

of something like the NES,

there are really two things I think you're going for

when you're collecting as a museum.

One are things that tell you something

about how it developed.

It could be key milestones in the system.

It could be every game they created for it.

But then you also want to get at its impact

on human experience and personal lives.

The fact that someone is creating a game, 30 years later,

for a system that's not longer being sold tells you

how important this game system was in the first place.

Meanwhile, Austin traveled to the West Coast

to visit our friends at IGN.

Now you could tell by the studio's decor

that they appreciated both the modern games

and the retro experiences equally.

- These are our living history.

It's part of our heritage.

We don't stop playing instruments just

because something comes along that's more sophisticated.

People didn't stop playing acoustic guitars,

because electric guitars were invented.

We have more sophisticated hardware,

bur more sophisticated does not necessarily mean better.

A quick internet search for Nintendo Homebrew led us

to a site called Nintendo Age,

which seems specifically devoted to that culture.

- Well, the homebrew scene wasn't really

the original intention of Nintendo Age.

It was just sort of something that just happened.

People came to our site, because they saw

that homebrews were listed in the database.

- See, this is what I find fascinating.

I would always think that the reason

that people would come to Nintendo Age is,

me and you would go there, because nostalgia.

We want to see games that we're familiar with.

But we're saying that there's a level of verisimilitude.

Like, they're looking for an NES experience

that they've never had before.

- Make no mistake about it.

This is a brand new market

for a very old system.

While Austin was in California,

he checked out GDC, the Game Developer's Conference.

This is where all the major players

in modern game development showed off all their latest

and greatest tools and toys, and a lot

of the experiences didn't even resemble video games

by 1988 standards.

Yet, right in the middle

of all these technological monstrosities,

was Independent Game of the Year, Shovel Knight.

That year's Independent Game of the Year was a throwback

to the eight-bit era of gaming.

- The love for NES games is why we did

the whole Shovel Knight project in the first place.

Everything from Shovel Knight just started with the seed

of an idea to do something that was similar

to all the NES games that we knew and loved as kids.

With the eight-bit aesthetic, we weren't sure if

that's something that people were gonna like,

or if that's something that could be popular.

When we went to PAX, and people played it,

when they played the King Knight demo,

we knew that people were excited about it.

It means that the style is enduring,

that pixel art is a thing

that wasn't just something from the past,

that it continues into the future.

So one thing we had going for us was there did seem

to be a love for that eight-bit aesthetic,

which isn't really surprising.

I mean, retro culture, in general,

was seeing a big resurgence in popularity.

Compare it to vinyl.

Record stores were thriving again.

People were more than willing to look past the drawbacks

of the obsolete technology for the gratification,

that tactile experience, that physical medium.

But the problem was we weren't just talking

about a pixel art aesthetic like Shovel Knight.

There's a huge difference between making a NES-stylized game

and one that will run on the actual hardware.

Let's first start by defining eight-bit.

A lot of people think it has to do with the graphics,

but it's actually about the processing.

But what is a bit?

It's the smallest unit of data for a computer.

Essentially, it's a switch that can either be on or off,

one or zero, and it's this state that tells the computer

how to proceed with the program.

A simple non-technological proxy might be a coin flip.

Heads, we have chicken for dinner.

Tails, we have steak for dinner.

That's one coin flip, one switch,

one bit where there are two possible outcomes.

What if we had two bits?

What if we had two coins?

We could have heads-heads, heads-tails,

tails-heads or tails-tails, four possible outcomes.

With eight bits, with eight coins to flip,

there are 256 possible outcomes.

So essentially an eight-bit processor is one

that's only able to process eight bits of data at one time.

How does that stack up to today's computers?

Well, even the processor found in your cell phone is 64-bit.

A 64-bit machine can transfer

18 quintillion bits at one time.

Now this is an oversimplification,

but in coin flip terms, a modern computer can decide

what to have for dinner, what show to watch,

what color to paint the walls

and then read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy,

word-by-word, over a billion times,

while the NES is still trying

to decide whether we should have chicken or steak.

Is there any compelling reason why we should try

and make a game actually playable on the system hardware

when it would be so much easier to make the same exact game

in every way in a much shorter amount of time

for a modern system, a computer, an iPhone, whatever.

- Sure, you know, when you develop a game for the NES,

you have just added to the history, to the legacy

of the various lineages that came from the NES.

Let's take, like, the Mega Man series or Castlevania series.

You know, you've got Mario.

Final Fantasy.

- Final Fantasy. - You've got

Zelda. - Metroid.

- Metroid. - Yeah, it goes on and on.

I mean, if you develop for the NES,

you've created an artifact.

You've now become part of a catalog

that has such a rich legacy.

Legacy, sure,

but maybe there was a reason we left it in the past.

- Section Z.

- Are we looking at this through rose-colored glasses,

you think ?

Is this the gameplay experience

that we want to recapture ?

Maybe an even more relevant criticism came

from the Fine Brothers Teens React series of videos

where teenagers, including someone who may be familiar

to Game of Thrones fans reacted

to playing the Nintendo for the first time.

You are reacting to this.

- Is that, uh, hold up, let me.

Audio, video, is this a projector?

--

- This is old-school stuff right here.

- This is sad that, like, I know what this is,

but I've never, like, seen one in real life.

- Looks like a brick.

- From like 1920.

You are going to be playing Super Mario Bros.

- Yes!

?

It's like as big as my face.

Go ahead and put it in.

- Don't judge me.

- Okay.

- Um...

It's kind of a bit, oh, oh.

Power?

Okay.

- Power.

- Let's go! - Bomb!

Is it working, though?

- No.

- I did it.

That was so, wait, no?

I did it, no, yes?

Did I do it wrong?

- Yay, um, no.

Yeah, it's like flashing .

- I make fun of my dad

of, like, not knowing how to use stuff.

People tried lots of things

to try to get the games to work.

And the most popular of which was taking the game back out

and then blowing on it.

- Oh! - And then putting it back in.

- Oh, nope, I don't want to, I'm scared.

Okay , it's happening , okay.

♪ Ding ding ♪

- I love this game.

- I feel like I'm in Wreck-It Ralph.

- This controller sucks.

This is the least comfortable controller ever.

Oh !

- Oh dammit, dude, I already died!

.

- I literally died first time.

That was so poor.

So would you say this is better or worse

than consoles of today?

- Worse.

- Worse - Worse.

- There's, like, problems with just freaking

starting this up, and you still want to tell me

that a 1080p Xbox One is worse than this game.

Get out of here.

- I mean, it's kind of outdated now.

So I mean, got to let go of the past here and move on.

I think he was right.

Maybe my fascination with this project only served

to prove how old and out-of-touch I've become.

But millions of people tuned in

to watch the kids react to the NES video.

It means it had to have relevance to somebody.

- My name's Matt Barker, and I run a group

called the First United Church of Nintendo.

We're roughly at about, I think, 1,200 members already.

I have people all over the world

that follow me on Facebook and Instagram.

I like to meet everybody's families.

I do fundraisers for the community

and things like that as well.

Redefining what it meant

to be devoted to this gaming console,

Matt had applied for official religious status

for the First United Church of Nintendo.

- I think what Church does here

with people is it gives everybody a spot to come meet,

talk, amongst people with similar interests.

It's basically memories, creating new ones,

reliving some old ones,

knowing that we don't have

like a, quote-unquote, higher being,

but it's about, more or less, just about being together.

So a fair hypothesis was in order to find the people

that would be interested in this culture, I just had

to go to where the nerds were gathered together.

Except...

I didn't know there were

any new NES games. - Do they still make new

NES games?

I don't know any new NES games.

- Oh.

- I don't know.

Yup.

- I don't know.

- I didn't know they were still making them.

I didn't know they actually still made them.

So here at Dragon Con, we had one

of the biggest mass gatherings of nerds in the country.

People were unapologetically nerdy,

that loved the NES, and yet not a single one

of them could name a post-market developed NES game.

That did not bode well for our ambitions for this project.

Good idea or not, we crossed the threshold.

It was too late to turn back now.

- So what stands between us, where we are here, day one,

and a finished game?

What do we need to accomplish?

- Well, I mean, first, I have to,

I have to learn the fundamentals of the language

that was used to program that system.

- And to do that-- - Which is an

archaic language.

- You need to know exactly what kind

of game it is we're gonna be programming,

in the first place. - Yeah, yeah, you know,

what genre, what the mechanics are gonna be,

and then we--

- I want to know that before we can do the assets

and the music and the--

- Music and the graphics

and the whatever. - Everything that we need

to create the game. - And the story.

Yeah, I mean, maybe what we should do

is just immerse ourselves,

play as many NES games as possible

and just kind of remember, you know, what worked,

what didn't work.

- I like this plan.

So a lot of these are actively not good.

- Yeah, I forget how many terrible games were

in this 700-and-so-on game catalog.

- With so many examples of failure ,

how do we ensure that our game doesn't suck?

- Now if I'm gonna go to an expert to talk about

why some Nintendo games sucked, it would be you, so.

♪ He's gonna take you back to the past ♪

James Rolfe, maybe better known

by his character's moniker, The Angry Video Game Nerd,

had built a veritable empire with the YouTube show

that examined all the shortcomings of NES games.

If anyone could help me navigate the minefield

of poor design choices for games

for the system, it'd be him.

♪ The Angry Video Game Nerd ♪

- You know, it's great hearing this from James Rolfe.

I want the nerd to tell me what our game can't be.

- You got to think Zelda.

Get Zelda in your head, not High Glide,

not Spiritual Warfare, none of that fucking bullshit.

You got to channel that Tri Force.

When you mix green and brown, nobody likes that.

It looks like shit and puke.

You don't want that.

Don't do any of this shit like Frankenstein on NES.

Even Metroid had some problems with that,

with those big, long fucking passwords.

You'll do that shit!

I don't want to see asterisks and commas

and fucking zeroes and O's looking like each other

and fucking I's and L's, like what the fuck?

Just have one group of letters, or even better,

have a battery backup.

Do what LJN did, but don't.

Just do the opposite.

Look at what LJN did, and then don't do that.

Do the complete fucking opposite.

- Okay.

This is

every Nintendo Power,

Nintendo Fun Club News,

Nintendo strategy guide-- - Oh wow.

- From 1987 to 1994, the entire run.

- Wow. - Of the NES' life.

What we're gonna do is we're gonna try to erase 30 years

of gaming vernacular from the our brain.

We're gonna use this as a time machine to go back--

- Yeah.

- To 1998, and remember this is what excited us

about an eight-bit experience. - For sure.

You know, these things, what--

- I mean, yeah, like these screen composites

of side-scrollers constituted an epic adventure.

- And you know, the Zelda maps

still the same thing. - Yeah, the maps,

that's what it all looks like put together.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I could be in there,

doing that. - Yeah.

If we were trying to build a game that sort of capitalized

on the things that the NES did best, you know,

we might see something like

the open-world exploration of The Legend of Zelda

and the secrets and the challenges and the puzzles,

while at the same time, serve an epic story

like you find in those RPGs,

early RPGs like a Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior,

with the platforming mechanics

of a Super Mario Brothers and a stage selection

where you inherit the monster's powers,

that you can play out of order, like in Mega Man,

creating the sense of mood

of like a Castlevania or a Metroid

with the cinematics of like a Ninja Guide.

- Yes, it sounds, it sounds easy.

We got this.

How do you even get started learning this archaic system?

- The starting point is at the beginning.

And the beginning is learning how

to program 6502 assembly language.

- My goal for tonight is to make something happen,

anything, something move on the screen,

something show up on the screen,

something input or something, anything.

- You know, to get started, you just have to start doing it.

The tools you need to make an NES game are as simple

as Microsoft Notepad, Paint, a graphics editor

and an assembler, that's it.

And they're all free.

Half of them are already on your computer to begin with.

- The ecosystem is so small.

It's just you and the hardware.

There's almost nothing else.

Whenever you build a game for a modern system

like an iPhone, you have to contend with game engines.

You have to worry about what the operating system is doing.

You have to worry about digital distribution stores.

There's so many things that you have

to worry about, but on the NES,

it's just you and a text editor and the system.

- Yes!

- All right. - Okay, now,

doesn't look like much, but the screen is red.

In the NES emulator, the screen is red.

Nice.

- Admittedly, far cry from the actual video game, but--

The screen is red.

- The screen is red.

Obviously, I was gonna need additional help.

That pace was way too slow for me.

So I tracked down Brian Parker

from a company called retroUSB.

He created a tutorial series that helped beginners

like me get started programming for the NES.

- I went to college for computer engineering

and focusing on supercomputer architecture.

When I got out,

all of the supercomputer companies were bankrupt,

so I didn't have a job.

So it's interesting that SGI doesn't exist anymore,

but Nintendo still does.

Is this your, this is your main gig?

- Yes.

Wow, so you do this full-time.

- This has been my full-time job for 12 years.

His Nerdy Nights tutorial series helped me

with syntax and structure and all the foundational stuff

I really need to know to get started.

- There were a lot of complaints

that all the programming knowledge was sort of hard

to get to, locked away in forums

where you had to ask a question to get an answer.

And beginners don't know what question to ask.

- What are the pitfalls I should be watching for?

- Giving up too early.

Well, you're not gonna do that.

- No, no.

Is that a common--

- Yeah.

Why do you think people give up?

- I think people hit one spot

where they don't figure it out,

and then they never try it again.

And that's exactly what happened as soon

as I started to deviate from the tutorials.

It turned out assembly language wasn't even

that difficult, but how it interfaced

with the NES hardware was really unintuitive.

- My profession, like, I'm a programmer.

So I thought I'll get a Nintendo,

and I'll learn to program on it.

And it was interesting.

It's very small-scale hardware.

There's things that are very simple about it.

But there's also things that are very complicated about it.

Getting a couple of things on the screen,

getting a background up, that comes pretty quick.

But then there's all these rough edges.

Everything's synchronized.

The scanning of a cathode ray television going back

and forth across a screen,

and things like sprites flickering,

'cause there's too many on the screen

or if you do transitions the wrong way,

like you get an image that looks wrong.

Things are in the wrong places.

Getting all those dark corners sorted out took me

like a year or two just to get used to all of that.

- In a modern game engine, in a programming language,

if you want a random number, you'd write random

and then in parenthesis 50, and you get a random number

between zero and 50, you know, whatever.

- Right, right.

- Very easy there to conceptualize.

On the NES, there is no random function.

It doesn't exist with that hardware.

It's not that easy.

- I don't understand,

because I know games had random things happen,

and literally, I've spent like a week trying to figure out

how to get a random number, and...

Is there, like, a forum or something that...

♪ Well, misery loves company ♪

♪ That's why we're thick as thieves ♪

♪ Let's move out to the country ♪

♪ And live just the way we please ♪

♪ We'll write a song and sing along ♪

♪ And sway into the sound ♪

♪ And the chorus will go like this ♪

♪ We burn the city down ♪

♪ We burn the city down ♪

♪ Yeah, we burn the city down ♪

I headed to the middle of nowhere

to meet two of the top moderators in the NES dev forums,

who I knew by their handles, Memblers and Tepples.

They agreed to meet me at the strip mall retro game store

that probably hadn't been maintained

since the NES was relevant.

But this was the place that I'd meet the genius programmers

that would be the project's salvation.

They just weren't exactly what I had in mind.

I was expecting college professors or something.

And instead, these guys were caricatures.

I mean, Memblers with his Gwar T-shirt

and his long, scraggly ponytail.

And Tepples with a, I don't even know how to describe

what Tepples was wearing.

- What I'm wearing now is considered nice clothes

in the universe where some of my games take place.

It's a shirt, a long vest and knee.

These guys were nerds.

And I mean that in the traditional sense of the word.

You know, in a time when nerd culture has been popularized

and made trendy and sexy, these guys represent what

that word should mean.

They were deeply passionate about a thing

that the average person couldn't appreciate

and didn't understand.

It was awesome.

I couldn't have asked for a better source of guidance.

♪ And every night our family will make a joyful sound ♪

♪ And sing of that triumphant day ♪

♪ We burned the city down ♪

♪ We burned the city down ♪

♪ Yeah, we burned the city down ♪

♪ We burned the city down ♪

♪ Yeah, we burned the city down ♪

- And there was an email list

where people writing emulators were talking

about the technical, just sharing technical details

of what they discovered and stuff.

And I just figured it would be good to make a website

to put all that stuff together.

I feel like it's achieved pretty much the goal.

I mean, it's become kind of self-sustaining

where I've helped some people learn.

And they were able to help other people learn things.

And it's just really grown and just kind of snowballed

from there, as you just get so many other people that,

as they gain experience, you know,

they're better able to help other people

when they're starting out.

- And you know, with their sort of master tutelage,

I really began to understand how this code worked

and was able to produce something

that looked very much like a game in the NES emulator.

It was awesome.

But the goal wasn't to get it to run on an emulator.

The goal was to get it to run on an actual cartridge.

Okay, so what did we find out about hardware?

- So actually it's not that difficult.

I mean, it's pretty much an empty case.

You have the cartridge itself.

It's a real simple board.

You got the data chip.

You got the graphics chip and a mapper.

So from a technology perspective,

it's not that tough at all.

- We can get all the parts ourselves

and start snapping together boards

with like 3D-printed cartridges maybe.

- Yeah, yeah, if we wanted to put all this using some

of the more traditional stuff,

we could put it together ourselves,

but it doesn't make sense.

Is it that tough?

No, but you actually have companies out there that make it.

- Make new NES--

- I did a little bit of research.

There's a company called Infinite NES Lives.

They actually do the manufacturing of the board,

of the plastic, of everything.

And they'll put it all together for us, too.

I don't know why, but I had this delusion

of some corporate office or some industrial assembly line

that was cranking out new cartridges.

But no, the offices of Infinite NES Lives where brand-new,

eight-bit experiences were being created was

that little trailer behind the RV.

- We order the circuit boards in large volume,

and they come just like this, in a panel.

My partner is actually my brother,

does all of the circuit board soldering,

assembling and testing.

We have our USB device, where you can just plug it in

and quickly program the game on to the circuit board.

And so the circuit board just goes in the cartridge.

The plastic's in.

You screw it together.

Package the game up in the same fashion

that you would've walked into a store 30 years ago

to buy a Nintendo game off the shelves.

- If this works, it will be the culmination

of like 30 years of anticipation.

Can we flash a thing to a cartridge?

- Here's hoping.

- Mystic Searches on a cartridge.

Nope.

Now is this standard NES nonsense

of not being able to flash thing to a cartridge,

or is it really not working?

Oh!

- Nice!

So officially, we could do it.

We have the technology.

But we'd spent so much time nerding out

over the technological side of things

that we'd kind of let the creative side of the game slip.

It was time to shift gears and figure out

what this game was gonna be about.

- So games in the arcades, in the early days, right,

the golden age of arcades, really couldn't tell a story,

'cause it was really a high score.

They wanted people popping their quarters,

and they didn't want people

to spend too much time on the machines.

Games for the ColecoVision or the Atari 2600,

there were a lot of single-screen.

You have games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, for example,

where the NES really allowed gamers to go home,

really dive into the story.

They could save their game.

Look at where video games are today

with a lot of them are stories.

They're almost like movies, to a point.

And I think it really started with the NES.

- I actually have some drawings in that same box

that say Mystic Searches on it.

I don't know when that came about

or why it was called that, at all,

and I don't know if that was something

that we had come up with, or that I had given to it.

I guess that's the name to go with.

We set up our first meeting with Elizabeth

to try and determine how to pull an actual story out

of those eight-year-olds' illustrations.

- How could we make this fantasy

but at the same time not let it be derivative?

- How much of what you created

when you were eight is fundamental

to the story of this game?

- I can go back to stuff that I wrote when I was eight,

and we could base the story on that.

But if we do, it should probably be loosely based

on the stuff that I wrote when I was eight, 'cause

an eight-year-old wrote it. - You were eight, yeah.

- Granted, a lot of media in the world right now seems

like an eight-year-old wrote it, but I aspire

to maybe make this a little bit more interesting.

And it'd be really worth examining, you know,

what is at the base of fantasy

that makes it-- - For sure.

To help answer that question,

Elizabeth traveled north

through mysterious swamps to meet

with 21-time Best Selling fantasy novelist, Piers Anthony.

Besides being a prolific writer of unique fantasy worlds,

his Incarnations of Immortality series inspired me

to want to be a writer as a kid,

probably right around the same time

that I was drafting the first ideas

for the game world we were now building.

- We're trying to create a fantasy world,

and yet it's very important that it's not,

it's not the same stuff regurgitated again,

you know, with people.

There are thousands of fantasy worlds out there.

Why are we creating a new one?

What's different this time?

- I get credit for having a lot

of imagination, and I have a lot.

I have more imagination than anybody I know.

But I get credit for more

than I actually have.

And Xanth is a good example,

because how do I invent such a fantastic land?

Well, I took Florida.

I added magic.

I adapt it.

The average reader wants to identify,

and you need to give him that chance.

- So creating a character who everyone can identify with,

that's the challenge there, isn't it?

- You can get pretty fantastic,

as long as you let the reader identify.

Yeah.

- So with Legend of Zelda, the story is

that Miyamoto based it on the area around his house, right,

his childhood adventures.

- The images for it was the adventures

that Miyamoto had when he was a kid,

exploring Kyoto and the woods around his house

and being lost and finding a cave system,

and that sort of spawned this whole--

- So his childhood adventures became

everyone else's childhood adventure.

- Right.

In essence, I wonder if maybe that's what we should look to,

as far as writing the story for Mystic Searches.

Instead of studying world mythologies and stuff like that,

sure, we could do that to a point,

but to make this uniquely our story,

why don't we look to those sort of icons

that we gave mythological way to when we were kids?

- Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. - You know, things

in my neighborhood and my experiences growing up

and your experiences and Elizabeth's experiences.

What do you remember about where we grew up?

- There was like the turnoff into the woods.

And that was like the we're gonna find Bigfoot back here.

Right!

- It looked like something out of, like, It, from 1991.

That's what it looked like.

Obviously, we didn't have a lot of ninja swords

where we grew up, so you know, we're picking up a flute

and pretending it's a whatever,

or it's just being a flute.

- It would be gratifying to bash the shit out

of some creatures with guitars.

Absolutely.

Since music became such a formative part

of both of our lives.

- Yeah, independently.

We could have a traveling minstrel who is also the hero.

- There's a good thing.

The kung-fu grip on the mandolin and just--

- One of our buddies, his mom said,

"Oh you shouldn't hang out back in the woods,

"because that's where the burnouts hang out."

There was no context for what the burnouts were,

so we invented this entire mythology about this cult

of people that would chase down children and--

- Burnouts.

- The burnouts.

Austin and I began to riff

about quirky urban legends we remembered

from our respective childhoods.

Growing up in Texas, he remembered the bats.

And I had this story about a mall

that had apparently been sinking into the swamp.

And we talked about a midway that brought a ghost town

to life three months out of the year.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth traveled to London

to visit friends and family.

While she was there, she found herself re-inspired

by the alchemy of diverse cultures

and the thousands of years of rich history

that served as the foundation of the modern city.

And she wasn't the only one traveling.

I've actually always felt a weird connection

to Mount St. Helens.

It erupted the day after I was born.

- Oh wow.

- I actually have a vial of ash from the eruption.

It's right on my desk, right where I'm programming the game.

We traveled to the Pacific Northwest

to check out the Portland Retro Gaming Expo's swap meet.

It was like a massive retro gaming trading post.

There, we met John Hancock,

who had probably the most comprehensive collection

of video games I'd ever seen,

including a host of homebrews.

- I think the thing that's important is to remember

that passion of playing that eight-bit experience,

and if you can translate that into your new project,

you're gonna have a whole gaming community behind you.

But unfortunately, the travel

to Portland wasn't exclusively for the project.

- So I went to visit my grandmother,

because she's slipping deeper into dementia.

I think that they were cleaning out some of her stuff

that they brought from Texas.

And there were a bunch of things of my dad's

that I didn't know that she still had.

Apparently he was wearing this belt buckle

when he was killed.

It's funny that we're out here exploring

a fantasy narrative, and I discovered a talisman.

I feel like the idea of relics

and artifacts should be integral to the gameplay,

'cause we keep running into these.

The whole project started when you found the NES carts.

So the game itself began when you found an artifact.

- One of the great things about the NES was the music.

It is a lot more complex

and nuanced than you would even expect it

to be able to be most of the time.

Those iconic melodies

from the eight-bit era had outlasted most

of the pop music of the time.

And those melodies were often reimagined as anthems

by rock bands like Bit Brigade at events MAGFest.

- It kind of adheres to the concept

that adversity breeds good art.

You just have certain restrictions you have to deal with.

And that bred this really interesting genre

of cool music that I'm into.

You know, the fact that it's video game music

is not necessarily why I dig it.

I dig it, 'cause it's good, it's cool.

It's interesting, and it's got its own unique voice to it

that doesn't exist in other places.

And it was great to know

that this music could be appreciated in that way.

But I needed to go the other direction.

While bands like Bit Brigade were arranging

classic video game music for a modern rock band,

I needed to learn how to devolve music

into what sounded like a classic video game soundtrack.

I found this kind of descendant of MAGFest called MAGStock.

It was this outdoor camping festival

that featured chiptune artists creating original music

in that style, and while musicians sitting

around a campfire making music was as old as music itself,

it was completely unexpected to see the instruments

of choice be laptops and modified Game Boys.

- So on an NES, we have two channels

that can generate square waves.

And the square wave is literally just a wave

like a sound wave that looks like a square.

Sounds kind of like that.

You also have a triangle wave,

which a lot of people have used for bass.

I'm just gonna, yeah.

Again, just, you know,

a sound wave that looks like a triangle.

And then last but not least,

you have your white noise, which is just...

Fuzz.

- I'd really be curious

to see how you take to working with two square waves,

a triangle wave and a noise channel,

and that's what you get,

and you have to create an emotive sort of soundtrack.

- Basically, writing a piece of music

that had all of the themes in it, all of the movements,

your adventure, your main character, your bad guy,

and you know, you just write it that way.

So you can have 10 movements if you want,

but the simpler the better.

- Would you sit down at a piano and pluck it out,

or would you use the actual instrument

that it would end up sounding like?

- I would probably use the instrument that,

whatever instrument I have the idea on,

I would use to come up with the idea

and then translate it.

I mean, we do that all the time, making score.

I'll write something on piano or guitar or percussion

and then turn it into a glockenspiel

or a cello-- - Right.

- There's just a different bunch of choices.

- Sure.

And that's kind of the basis for our hero theme,

that sort of...

♪ Da, da, da, da ♪

♪ Da-da-duh, da da ♪

And you're gonna hear that motif come back

over and over again.

That's gonna be sort of like that's our hero's theme, right.

So we're gonna keep morphing that

as he goes through different parts of his journey,

and he's facing different adversaries.

And it's gonna mutate and change,

but that's the sort of main motif.

It's gonna keep cycling back through.

So at this point, all the creatives involved

in the project had done a thing.

We flexed our respective creative muscles

and did what we did.

You're really starting

to see this compelling fantasy narrative sort of evolving

from our collective visions.

That's when we all started to feel the immense pressure

of the constraints of the system.

All right, so here's a fun, new wrinkle,

not really a bug, 'cause I figured out the problem,

but here's the problem.

It says value out of range when I run the assembler.

- That means that we're out of space.

- We got like

nine screens in the game. - Nine screens, yeah.

Maybe 1/10 of the functionality that we had intended,

and you know, maybe 1% of the graphics that we had planned.

Let me give it some perspective

as to just how little space we're talking about here.

The maximum size for our game was 512 kilobytes,

but even that's a little misleading,

because the system could only see 32 kilobytes at a time.

The way that most games get around this problem is

that they would load different groups of data called banks,

but no matter what you did to try

and cram more programming data into that cartridge,

the system could only ever see,

at maximum, 32 kilobytes at a time.

So compare that to a modern game

that we might consider small, like a casual game,

something for your iPhone, Angry Birds.

The latest Angry Birds app was 37 megabytes.

So we're talking about trying

to build this epic adventure game

in 1/1000 the programming space of Angry Birds.

- So when you want to make a game,

especially if it's your first game, first of all,

you need to take all your ideas

and just go ahead and cut off the top 99%

of what you want to include in this game,

'cause it's not gonna happen.

- I got good ideas. - No, I'm sure you do.

It's just not gonna happen.

And then you need to take

however long you think it's gonna take you

and go ahead and double it.

And that'll be close to how long it's gonna take you

to make this first game.

I met with Elizabeth

to find out her progress in the game.

She had done exactly what we asked her to do.

She took all the iconography and threaded it together

to create this really compelling, complex narrative.

And as I read her pages of brainstorming,

I felt my heart begin to sink.

A little bit of foreshadowing

into how he's gonna conduct himself

throughout the rest of the story.

- So okay, this is beautiful.

We're playing with some beautiful thematic elements.

I love the string of hearing the song of the world,

seeing the shadows.

I love that.

I don't know how we can convey that.

Like, I don't even know how we can suggest that.

We're gonna have such limited verbiage to work with.

- All right, so, um,

how much verbiage do we have then?

- Worst-case scenario, none.

And it's done with imagery and gameplay,

and, you know, like...

- Okay, so, um,

okay, well, then we need

to talk about-- - I mean, this,

well, this is good.

I mean, we need context.

This is awesome, and it creates a very beautiful world

for us to begin, you know, crafting.

It makes the world much more real.

And this is so much more specific.

How could I phrase it so that someone

who didn't speak technology could easily understand?

So okay, to put it in perspective,

so this is the information for the text document

that you just showed to me, all right.

This is 2.43 megabytes, small text file, right.

The game we're making has to fit inside of 512 kilobytes,

like 1/5 the size of this text document, the entire game.

We're not just talking about the text in the game.

I'm talking about the text and the graphics

and the music, and all the programming, mechanics

and functionability is gonna be 1/5 the size

of that text document that you've got up right now.

So in talking about reduction,

when I start freaking out over , over,

see, it's not because the world that you're building

isn't absolutely gorgeous and beautiful.

When I say I don't know how we're gonna make it fit,

that's what I'm talking about.

- So let's say for example then,

that you've created this incredible world,

and you need to put it on to a platform

that only allows five of your main good ideas,

and you don't want to change the story,

and you don't want to compromise on the integrity

of your work, how are you gonna take this incredible,

rich and diverse world--

- I would have a problem.

, it would be like cutting off your hands

and feet to make yourself fit.

- Right.

Right.

- Which is one of my complaints about editing, the editor.

I mean, I left my best publisher, because the editor,

he cut out a whole first chapter of a Xanth novel.

He didn't know why that hurt me.

My parallel for that is the editor may say, you know,

"You're right

"So your left hand is inferior, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, so I'm gonna do you a favor.

"I'm gonna make you better by cutting off your left hand."

- Yeah.

- And he will not understand why you object.

- Yeah.

And Austin wasn't faring much better.

- So we've run into almost a narrative dilemma here,

because, you know, this character we've created, he's young.

He's kind of a vagabond.

He's a musician but also a little bit magical,

because he's a student of magic.

How am I supposed to convey that

in 16 pixels and three colors?

So this was the concept.

When you start reducing him down,

16 wide, you know, obviously,

all that detail just completely disappears.

- Is that, so...

- And then when you start getting rid of colors,

I started with, like, an overlay and just to try

and get the basic scale and shape of this sort of thing.

That's the best I came up with.

He looks like a drained Smurf.

Drained Smurf, I like that, yeah.

- Yeah, it's not good.

So yeah, that's harder than I thought.

It's crushing to have to destroy them

by reducing them to nothing,

to 16 pixels wide by 24 high and three colors, you know.

That's zero visual information.

So I guess what I'm wondering is

is the concept art creating an unrealistic expectation

for what we can actually do in sprites.

I stress the importance

of concepting everything out first,

but he pushed back suggesting maybe it was a waste

of time and even counterproductive not

to just jump straight to the sprites.

Truth is, neither of us knew how it was done

back in the '80s.

- At that time period, from like '85 to '94,

you relied heavily on illustrators to sell the game

through their box art.

And it was a great time.

It was a very exciting time if you were in the arts,

and you were an illustrator,

to be doing this kind of packaging.

- Dragon Quest, where we had Akira Toriyama,

who was known for his work in manga.

Here is a premier comic artist.

And Enix runs out and says, "Hey, we got to get this guy,

"and we got to put his art in the game.

"We got to do it right now."

And he makes little Akira Toriyama characters

that remain iconic to this day.

Characters like Slime or Dracky are some of those.

And at the same time, there's character portraits

that became a part of the series.

And you would look at the, you know,

the Japanese box for Dragon Quest,

which was Dragon Warrior here.

You look at the Japanese box of that,

and you look at the art in the game,

and they actually resemble one another.

- Oh yeah, I remember the player guide of that.

It's still on my shelf.

It's the most amazing game art.

That's what I'm aspiring to here.

- Right, so there were situations

where it began as a concept,

and then it was adapted that way.

Interesting, okay.

- Having somebody around, a creative team,

that's into it enough to create a vision of it

for the rest of the team has got to be necessary.

And my classic example is Mega Man 2,

where there was a complete disconnect between sales

and the people that were doing the game.

I love the Mega Man character he became.

But I mean, when they handed it to me,

with no drawing beforehand and nothing to go on,

and they said, "Draw us a Mega Man,"

well, I was thinking man.

I drew a mega man, you know.

And , and like Superman, you know, Batman,

let's draw Mega Man.

So I drew him.

And so there I was, left 30 years later,

twisting in the wind with my art being called one

of the 50 worst game pieces ever done.

How could that illustrator be such an idiot?

Nobody showed me any drawings.

So I think drawings are critical, always.

- I couldn't just start out on graph paper.

I didn't have enough knowledge yet

of working in that limitation.

So I'd still spend time drawing out a full illustration,

which wasn't wasted, 'cause we were able to put that art

into the manuals, when they had manuals

back then, right? - Sure, yeah, yeah.

- And that was great, because what we found

that it did is it, when somebody got the game,

and they opened up their little treasure box,

and they started looking through the manual and looking

at the characters, it started to visually give them an idea

of all the detail, all the nuances, all the facets

that made this character up.

So they were able to take that impression on to the screen

with the very limited character,

but they were able to see the mystery scar.

They were able to see the satchels and packs.

When all it was was maybe three brown pixels.

As for me, working within these constraints

had me questioning my ability as a musician.

- Can't just take an MP3 and play it through you NES.

Back in, I think it was '98 or '99,

I had been waiting for someone

to come up with a audio format

for the NES and nobody did it.

So I finally, one day, decided okay,

I'm sick and tired of it.

I'm gonna do it.

The code manipulates these audio channel registers

to square waves, the triangle, the noise channel

and the digitized channel to actually make the music.

- When I sit down to write a metal tune,

the song is written already.

I've been thinking about it for the past few days

or the past few hours.

Maybe it's a eureka moment, or I wake up with a crazy dream,

get over to the studio,

and it's there.

And I just .

And just go as fast as I can and get it out

before it evaporates.

With NES, you don't have that luxury.

You try to get your ideas out.

You fail over and over and over again,

and you refine the song until it makes sense.

So it completely changes the way that you write music.

It's impossible to improvise the same way

that you do on a live instrument.

- You know, I would write some things,

and then I'd get 'em in a MIDI file,

and then they had to translate the MIDI file

to an ASCII file, which basically ended up

just being a paragraph of numbers.

It was eight boxes across and eight boxes down.

So I had 64 boxes.

And so each of those little boxes represented something that

that wave could've done.

And that's how I would try to make sounds.

- You have to learn how to program a spreadsheet.

And it's really, really limited,

and it's really difficult to get your mind around it.

- If we were to start with, you know,

some basic chordal progressions,

so we can establish sort of mode, you know,

to give it sort of an emotive feel.

Back to that A suspended to an E minor.

- Okay.

- So basically we're going...

There we go.

If you want to make it a little prettier than that.

- Sure.

- How do you translate, you know,

I strummed a guitar chord,

then over to...

Literally, you are rehearsed

in playing music with a keyboard,

with a computer keyboard - With a QWERTY keyboard.

- With a QWERTY keyboard.

But it was like trying to create music this way

was activating the wrong side of my brain or something.

I couldn't create anything that I considered compelling.

And trying to split my attention between that

and the coding was so draining,

especially when the code started to break.

Everything's fine, right?

Everything's playing the way that it should,

and then yada, yada, yada,

I'm walking along, da, da, and then...

Oh.

Like, I don't know what could cause that.

I don't know what.

- Oh.

- Yeah. - It's getting worse.

- And it gets worse and worse.

And then all of a sudden, it completely breaks.

You know, I started to look through and tried, you know,

what, where-- - And now they're flashing.

- There's that jumping, yeah.

So why, what, I, can't release that.

There's 20,000 lines of code at this point.

I don't even know where to look.

Where do you start looking?

- Can you go back to the forums,

talk to Temples and Mumblers?

- Memblers and Tepples, uh,

well, no, it's not like that anymore.

I mean, they showed me the foundational information

of how to get this thing set up,

but I've been off the script for a really long time.

The only person at this point

who understands the complexities

of this engine is me.

- You find a bug.

And how long does it take to find that bug

and to fix that bug?

It's the same problems

that the developers were having 25, 30 years ago,

but we don't have millions of dollars backing us up

in the development studio to figure out that problem, right.

- You get stuck on, and in my own journey,

I got stuck on one little problem

for like a month or two.

You get bogged down at a certain point,

even after you know what you're doing.

- As you're making the game,

the code just turns into spaghetti.

I mean, you have a subroutine jumping to this bank.

And when it's pulling music, it's going to this bank.

And it just turns into a huge mess.

And you start changing one value,

and the whole thing blows up,

and you're like, "What did I just do?"

- How did you, back in the day,

before there were these lofty debugging tools built

into these engines, how did you debug the code?

- You would do what's typically

called rubber duck debugging.

- Dare I even ask what rubber duck debugging

could possible mean?

- Look at your code.

You think about what it's going to do,

and you explain what your code should be doing

and why you've written it that way.

What's key is being able to explain your code,

whether it's someone else

or even an inanimate object such as--

- A rubber duck, right, okay,

so you take a little, yellow, rubber, squeaky ducky,

and you put it next to your computer station,

and when you have trouble, you start

explaining your code. - You explain it.

- You'll be explaining, explaining, explaining,

and then oh, oh, there it is, 'cause I didn't.

No, no, I get it, I get it.

- So it's essentially the act of teaching,

the act of explaining what's going on,

that helps organize the code in your own mind.

You tell the duck. - I have people

that think I'm crazy already.

If I'm sitting there talking to a little, yellow duck--

- Now it doesn't have to be a yellow duck.

- And that's good,

because I couldn't really see myself explaining my code

to a yellow duck, but I did have someone who was constantly

in the studio that always seemed eager to help.

We load x into object counter.

So when we call object type x in building a y.

And so this kind of became my weird routine

when I'd find myself stuck in the corner with code.

I'd explain it to Georgia the dog

until a solution presented itself.

Not the most elegant solution, but it got results way more

than I'm proud to admit.

That's supposed to be a y, isn't it?

That definitely says x.

And it's supposed to be a y .

Oh you're a good rubber ducky, booger.

Finding a solution to Elizabeth's issue

was maybe a little bit more complex.

Unlike Piers Anthony,

Elizabeth had a great creative relationship with her editor

And while visiting her in Norway,

she decided to solicit her help

in what she considered an impossible narrative puzzle.

- It's going all right.

It's interesting.

It's different.

In what way?

- I'm just, never, I'm not used to being so restricted.

It's like working,

it's like working the wrong way around, you know.

Right, let me formulate it.

Let me try and explain

where I'm at, right.

One of the challenges I face is that I can create a world

of these mini-stories that help to build the character

and help to build the world,

but every time I present them,

their response is "Oh that's great.

"That would be fantastic

"if this was a novel we were writing.

"But it's an eight-bit game we're writing.

"It doesn't work.

"In game mechanics, none of this shit works."

Following our lead in exploring nostalgia

and the folklore of our youths, Elizabeth went on a mission

to reexamine the common folklore of Norway

that she remembered from her own childhood,

hoping it would push her

in a narrative direction.

She was struck by how primitive

and simple the folklore was.

And there was an interesting reason for it.

- It was kind of memory lane, you know.

It was nostalgic, to revisit some

of these stories I haven't even thought about

for 20-odd years.

The simplicity of the Norwegian folk stories

is a really nice parallel with the simplicity

of this eight-bit world.

What we need to start doing now

is finding individual building blocks

and creating the mini-stories,

the individual lessons that the hero goes through.

Yeah, so, you know, I went to Norway,

spent a week there, did quite a lot of research,

and I was lucky enough to get a really cool tour

of Hunderfossen, which is this fairly ancient place

in the depth, the darkest depths of Norway.

But they study old folklore.

They've collected the old folklore.

And the really crazy thing about the Norwegian stories is

that unlike the mythology of Europe,

where there's a lot of spirituality infused,

there's a lot of creation myth infused into that lot,

it's not so in Norway.

It's really quite, it's quite superficial in many levels.

It's much more to bring warning.

Don't go walking in the swamp,

because the Huldra might come.

And she's this lady, and she's all sexy--

- So it's really like to warn children against bad behavior

and not necessarily-- - Exactly, exactly.

- This is connected to some supernatural--

- That's interesting. - Precisely.

Yeah, precisely. - More, sort of,

the first order of mythology is instruction.

- Exactly, yeah.

Austin also reached out externally for help

with his part of the project.

Now Jherin Miller was just a kid.

He wasn't even alive when the NES was relevant.

But his proposed sprite art

for our game characters was amazing.

- So obviously you're a good illustrator.

But you understand pixel art in a way that

when I first started looking at it,

it's harder than it seems like it would be, you know.

- Yeah.

- Can you tell me, like, what do you think about

when you start working on a sprite?

What's your process like?

- Yeah, usually, if I have an idea for a character

or something, I just stick with one color

and just, like, blob things in

until it kind of looks like something recognizable.

And then I'll go back over that and refine it

into a shape that makes more sense.

So you build the silhouette first?

- Yeah, yeah. - Okay.

That's interesting.

I should've thought of that.

Matt Groening always says that a character has

to have a recognizable silhouette first.

One of the things that I noticed about your work,

and that really impresses me, is your ability

to suggest detail with just a few pixels.

For instance, some of the test sprites

that you did for Amriya,

you know, she's got two pixels that suggests

that she has feminine, angry, magical eyes.

How do you go about creating a gestalt impression

with such limited tools?

- Yeah, actually that's a trick I learned is

to step back a few feet, or even look at it

from across the room.

Or I try to blur my eyes and just see it as like a bunch

of blobs instead of crisp pixels.

- That's hilarious.

I mean, I know the same trick obviously,

but I think about it in terms of composition, you know,

and like, is it jumping off the shelf from across the room.

Once I saw what he was doing,

it seemed so obvious.

I mean, these are core principles of character design.

I'm not sure why I felt like I needed

to deconstruct that for this project.

- So this is a style

that you feel more comfortable working in now?

- Yeah, no, I mean, this is something that we can produce.

I can work within this.

We were really excited about this new visual style

that we were working with,

but we were a little too close to it.

We already knew what these graphics

were supposed to represent.

In order to find out what other saw

when they looked at the art, we got together

with the Ringling College of Art and Design Game Club,

and giving them only the low-resolution pixel art,

we asked them to reverse engineer concept

to determine what our sprites were suggesting.

- And it was really interesting,

going through the pixel art, to see how reading the forms

of the pixels help to inform the way

that we illustrate that from there.

- It was really fun.

It's a really interesting process that we

as a group of like 10 or 15, plus more,

would have maybe five to 10 different variations

of the same character.

- And I think it was really interesting

how many people were like,

"Okay, so they're androgynous.

"I'm not gonna give them any defining features

"as to whether or not they're a boy or a girl."

- We ran into many differences with the hero character

and his choice of weapon.

- Having the eyes being the main part

of the face, it was interesting

to see how many people gave the character those big,

appealing, sort of anime-ish eyes.

- I mean, the pixel art gives you like an iconic silhouette.

But I think that it's really cool finding all

that a single dot can say.

- I think any kind of music that you make

that makes a statement and is special

and is memorable has to come from the heart.

And that sounds super pretentious,

but it's harder than you think to make

that actually happen when there's deadlines,

and there's technology you don't understand.

It's not easy to be genuine with limitations like that.

- Being able to get something that brings an emotion

to the surface for someone looking at your artwork

or listening to your music or whatever, it's very important.

Simple artwork can still, you know, can still evoke.

Simple tones can still cause emotion.

- We definitely turned a corner.

We were able to create compelling assets

for our NES experience.

We just weren't able to create 'em fast enough.

This is an example of what the main table looks like,

all the data that tells what tiles to draw

for the screen, and then this is the collision data

that we've come up with that sort of correlates, right.

And it's not like it's hard to type all this data in,

but it takes forever, and it's a lot of cutting and pasting.

And here's the bigger problem.

We test the game, right,

and then oh yeah, it's in the wrong spot.

Then I've got to open this file.

And I've got to find, I've got to remember oh,

it was one, two, three, four, five over.

Then I got to open this file.

And I've got to change some of it.

Ah, what was the hex value for water again?

Was it two or three?

Ah, I can't remember.

Then I got to look at my lookup chart.

And then I got oh yeah, it was three, okay.

And then I got, what was the tile number for tile three?

If we're gonna finish this game this decade,

we need a more efficient way

of getting the data for these screens.

Is it possible to create a tool, like in a modern language,

I know you're really good at this kind of stuff,

that can sort of give me the values that I need?

- Yeah, easy.

Really the next step for us is to find out

what your requirements are.

I'll set up the tools.

That way, you can focus more

on the actual world and the story.

We devoted a good bit of time

to creating a design document that would explain

to Josh exactly the kind of tool that we needed.

Working remotely, it took a little extra time.

He would program, and then we'd test things out.

And we'd see what worked, and we'd see what didn't.

Eventually, the tool had more lines

of code in it than the game itself.

But it worked.

We were able to quickly prototype things

and change things on the fly.

Our pace increased exponentially.

We finally had a version of the game

that we could start showing to people.

The reception was generally very positive,

and eventually word of the project got to Adam Goldberg,

creator of The Goldbergs on ABC.

Apparently, Adam had also dabbled

in creating games when he was a kid,

and so he felt a certain kinship to the project.

Now if you haven't seen the show, it features a lot

of icons from the '80s, including very prominently

the Nintendo Entertainment System.

To our amazement, he invited us out to Hollywood

so that he could feature the prototype

of our game on the show.

- The first time I discovered,

I think I read in Nintendo Power magazine or something,

that there was a cheat you could do in Mario Brothers

to get unlimited lives.

And you basically, a turtle is walking down the stairs,

and you would jump on it,

and it would-- - Right, right right.

- It would reflect back,

and you would get unlimited points

and start getting free guys.

And the first time I did that was as a defining moment

for me as anything growing up.

I had never been so excited in my entire life.

I didn't excel in sports.

I struggled in school.

You know, writing was something that I always loved,

but I didn't know where that would lead me.

And this moment, this was a crowning achievement for me,

getting those unlimited lives.

It was like this is better than scoring any touchdown ever.

Speaking of crowning achievements,

this felt surreal.

I mean, those silly, little illustrations I'd done

as an eight-year-old kid had yielded something

that was going to be broadcast

on national television during prime time.

I felt like I was on top of the world.

And as if to punctuate the validity of this project,

across town, at that very moment,

the Nintendo World Championships was happening

for the first time in 25 years.

There was actually more excitement

for the contest involving the retro games

than there were for the modern games.

But the biggest surprise came at the end.

Turns out that ambition

to create a new eight-bit experience was something

that an awful lot of people shared.

I'm sorry, are there, are there,

is there Hammer Brothers on top of a Bob-omb

and with a Blooper?

What did I just see?

Troll box, the troll box.

Oh, oh he's got dodging those hammers!

- Hi.

So that means I've been creating video games

for 30-plus years. - This might be as close

as this game gets, but Mystic Searches was officially

in the same room with Miyamoto.

- And I think making games is the funnest thing

in the world.

Please keep enjoying Nintendo games, thanks so much.

- A couple of weeks before The Goldbergs episode was slated

to air, I got a fun email from my friend Mark Neil.

Mark was one of the first people I met

after moving to Sarasota.

And after finding a mutual love for The Legend of Zelda,

we always talked about how we'd loved to work

on something together.

He was a really talented animator, so talented, in fact,

that he'd moved out west to accept a job at Telltale,

working on games like Minecraft and Walking Dead

and Game of Thrones.

I hadn't heard much from him since, but in his email,

he was proposing putting together a team

to make a modern version of Mystic Searches.

My mind was blown at the prospect, working with artists

of his caliber to bring this to a modern console.

I mean, talk about validating the project.

You know, with all the support

and attention the project started to get,

we developed a newfound confidence, and we really needed it.

Confidence is super important when you're working

on a long-form project like this

that's gonna take a year or two to complete it.

It keeps you going.

But there's a line when confidence becomes hubris.

And in retrospect, maybe this was it.

- So you want to go back out for a second Kickstarter,

knocking on the doors of all those people

who supported you the first time around?

- Well, I'm hoping it's not the same people.

The scope is changing.

If I had known that this was gonna be the scope

of the thing from the very beginning,

well, then I would've shot for a higher budget

so that we could've done these things.

As it is, there's no way we could do these things

on the budget that we have.

- I don't know.

It's definitely cool.

But part of the charm of this is the conceived

in your backyard, coded up in your garage, sort of,

kind of appeal to it, that nostalgia.

If you're gonna try to bust into that world

and get on the shelf in competition

with these other big market games, I mean,

they sort of wipe out your own imagination,

because it's telling you what this world is

rather than sort of suggesting it,

which is more in line with a kid's imagination.

- That's adding a whole lot of developmental work

at a late stage in this project.

I'd hate to see us take on too much

and have the project collapse under its own weight.

- I couldn't believe their objection.

This was an amazing opportunity

that I did not want to squander.

So I went ahead anyway.

I temporarily put progress in the NES version

to the side, because I knew this new arm

of the project was gonna elevate Mystic Searches

to a whole different league, especially when our friends

from IGN agreed to run the trailer.

Yeah, so this is what's gonna launch tomorrow.

To save a dying world,

a reluctant, young hero must study an ancient relic

to explore forgotten magic from another time.

Prepare for a cross-platform adventure

that will bridge the generations.

A new game experience

for the original Nintendo Entertainment System

and modern consoles, Mystic Searches.

- I mean, that's just, you know, I mean,

come on, man, that's cool.

I was in this sort of frenzy.

I needed the whole world to know that this project existed.

And through the IGN trailer and this modern game

and through The Goldbergs episode, and there it was,

all 1.4 seconds of national primetime exposure.

So victory, right?

I mean, six million people tuned in to that episode.

There were six million pairs of eyes

that just witnessed a brand-new, post-market NES game.

That's validation.

That's validation for me.

That's validation for my team that worked so hard.

That's validation for the entire community.

That's validation for this as an art form.

So use that as the impetus to launch our second Kickstarter.

It's gonna be great, right?

- We've reached a point right now

where video gaming is huge.

But we have too many critics

and not enough advocates.

A critic tends to focus on what is negative.

They try to look for what is wrong,

what they don't like.

And they like to talk about what they don't like.

Lots of people in video gaming like

to talk about what they don't like.

Not enough people are talking about what they do like,

what the positives are, what they enjoy,

what brought them to the dance in the first place.

- So I don't know who does this, but here I am

at the doctor's office

with a mallet fracture, it seems,

from reaching down and scratching my ankle.

So this'll have to be splinted for a while.

That'll make coding very fun, exciting.

It's fucking ridiculous.

You know, I'm under a fair amount

of pressure with other deadlines and so on.

With the baby coming, I really have to scale back my level

of involvement in the project, and of course,

I won't be involved with the project, moving forward,

but for right now, dude, I just can't give you

what you need from me.

- The ground started to crumble beneath our feet.

Even the project's greatest victories,

like the success with the initial Kickstarter,

came back to haunt us as all-new obstacles.

They're billing me

for $16,205 in back taxes.

Okay, we, well, we ride the second Kickstarter,

and then the first bit of funds go directly

towards paying this.

This is all business expense, I mean, you know.

- Okay.

- I think doing this kind of stuff is more

like a gambling addiction than anything else, you know.

You just , every success comes from hanging

in longer than makes any kind of sense.

- Oh we're so fucked.

- There's a bond that you form

with this creation that you make.

And you want nothing more than

to share that with other people.

You want other people to feel what you feel.

I mean, the best-case scenario is someone's gonna sit

and play it, and they're like, "Oh, that's cool."

And they're gonna move on to something else, and it's like,

I took a year out of my life to make this game, you know.

That's a harsh reality.

I mean, you want someone to stop and think of yours

as special, but in the grand scheme of things,

I mean, someone's gonna stop.

They're gonna play it for a couple of minutes,

and they're gonna move on.

- Five years now, no one's gonna care about

that homebrew anymore.

There's very few of these homebrews that are talked

about after they come out, a year or two later.

It's like, "Oh, that's a great game, let's pop it in."

That's nothing against these homebrewers.

It's hard to create a game with 100 people

that's as good as something like The Legend of Zelda.

The Legend of Zelda is a game that was worked on

by, you know, one of the most legendary game designers ever.

He wasn't just a guy just getting in for fun

and learning after a few years how to do it.

He's a guy that worked at this forever.

- Back to chasing down bugs for the NES game,

it was really hard to find motivation.

It's almost like it would take me less time

to rewrite the entire engine from scratch than it would

for me to find the bugs in this rat nest.

I can't justify spending any more time on a thing

that was supposed to be a novelty project.

- This was never a novelty project for you.

It's more like a vendetta .

- I thought it couldn't get worse.

I was wrong.

- It was pretty crazy.

I guess we were in the middle

of working on Minecraft 101.

He said he was going to go to get some lunch,

and he was gonna maybe go out for a ride.

Later that night, I get a Facebook message

from my friend who, uh, she was like,

"Well, he just passed away.

"I just, like, spoke to his wife,

"and he took a turn bad, and you know,

"got into a bad accident, and, you know,

"he passed away."

- It changes the, uh, the entire perspective

of what am I doing right now.

Is this really worth my time to be doing it?

- Oh every creative project takes its toll.

It's always a, it's a trade-off.

You're trading the days of your life

for something you hope is worth it.

- Remember when the project was doing well?

That was awesome.

- Well, I guess that's the question,

is, you know, does it have to be doing well

to be worth doing?

I was beyond frustrated.

This was a juvenile project about essentially creating

what amounted to a children's toy.

It wasn't supposed to get mixed up

with the complexities of adult life.

It was supposed to be the escape from all that.

To try and get past the existential crisis,

I returned home, visited a place of childhood merriment,

anything to stave off the growing sense of apathy.

Through older eyes and out of season, it was haunting.

I was standing in the company

of the skeletons of once great thrill machines

whose time of relevance had expired,

and I missed it.

I realized there was nothing left there for me.

It was time to step away for a while.

- If you only knew how many times I've been

in this exact same position.

You may be okay having this be another artifact

that you find in a closet somewhere in another 30 years

and take back out and mess around with.

I'm not.

Other people are invested now.

I'm invested.

I've spent a year crating art assets for this game,

and I need the emotional catharsis

of having this come to completion.

I told you that when we started.

So take whatever time you need.

Do what you need to do to get your head right.

We got to figure out what it takes

to get this across the finish line.

- I could finish this.

I could see this through.

But there was something I was gonna have to give up,

the fantasy, the romanticism of it, you know.

As long as this game was just an idea in my head,

it was just perfect.

But to actually see it realized, that was to bash it

into form within the constraints of reality.

That's exactly why we discard these ambitions as kids.

I mean, it's our rite of passage,

getting rid of those silly, little ideas,

all in the name of growing up.

I'd left my trail behind me.

The only way that I was gonna restore my conviction was

to trace back through 30 years of abandoned aspirations,

to find out how this first childhood ambition fit

within the constraints of my adult life.

♪ Hey, angel ♪

♪ Consider your position ♪

♪ Afraid to be consumed, savor it ♪

Your first take was pretty good.

First take was pretty good?

Don't be afraid. - Yeah, let's--

- Don't be afraid of winning.

If you have every choice in the world,

you never really have to, you're not confronted

with what do I have to do and what do I have

to give up to do that.

Everything came to a strange nexus point

when I sat down with filmmaker David Markey,

and he began to lament about his childhood pursuits.

- I started making films when I was a little kid.

I was about 11 or 12.

And I just shot stuff in my neighborhood.

I made a horror film

in 1974, that I called The Devil's Exorcist,

because at the time, The Exorcist was the big movie.

I remember I charged admission

to all the kids that were in the movie,

like a quarter apiece, to come see the movie projected

in my garage, which I had turned into a movie theater.

My film's just kept getting longer and longer

until eventually, around the time when I was 16, 17,

I got involved in the music scene

in Los Angeles at the time.

♪ Just like that ♪

♪ Dances with our sin ♪

♪ Just be there ♪

♪ Just be good ♪

♪ Just did as they were told ♪

- That's the thing.

I mean, when I was shooting Year Punk Broke, for example,

I had a finite amount of film with me.

And I'm dealing with these 50-foot cartridges

of Super 8 film that I have in a suitcase

that I was just sort of lugging with me all over Europe.

And I was at these music festivals,

and there's so much stuff going on.

And I was having to make a lot of decisions

on the spot of what I was going to shoot.

There was something about the necessity

that molded the shape of these films,

the content of these films.

There was just a certain finality about the process

of doing that, that was really cool.

It's not, this isn't a print,

or you know, some surrogate to experience delight

from that event.

And 1991 hit this exact film stock

that we're holding right now.

So having the tactile experience of touching it

and seeing it through the projector,

seeing light being pushed back through it, you know,

that's powerful.

That's interesting.

As we sat and talked about the creative benefits

of limitations juxtaposed against watching his film

of a young Nirvana, just prior to the grunge explosion,

I found a moment of clarity.

When you have no audience, when you have no budget,

when you have no technical proficiency,

when your endurance is faded and all of the supports

for your art have been kicked out from under you,

what reason is there to create?

It's not about money.

It's not about notoriety.

All that's left is the inexplicable compulsion

to do this thing, and once you know the reason

why you have the compulsion,

you've got to let that be enough.

- This is gonna be around a lot longer than I am.

And this will be looked at, you know,

as a piece of that time.

I mean, that says a lot more about it

than anything I can say.

- Yeah.

After almost two years

of this emotional roller coaster,

30 years of anticipation, Mystic Searches,

a brand-new, hardware-playable, cartridge-based game

for the Nintendo Entertainment System was almost finished.

But I had one more demon to face

before I could put this to bed.

Now most people were in Park City for the film festival.

I had a different engagement.

I'm amazed that I was able to track you down

and find you, here in Salt Lake City.

- Well, I'm glad we could get together.

- You were one of the first people employed by--

- Yes, I was the fifth person.

- Fifth person, you were employee number five.

How integral were you in the process

of approving official US releases and things like that?

Were you quality control?

Was that your job, to play these games?

- One of my titles while there was product analysis manager.

And as such, I would have to evaluate every single game

that was being potentially released

on the North American Nintendo System.

How many games, percentage

- I would say it was maybe 10%

that actually got to that point.

- Wow. - Before then,

probably about 20%, we're just like no, don't even try.

- You started Nintendo Power.

I mean, it was brilliant,

because it was a two-way conversation now.

And I find that fascinating.

There's always, especially in the early days,

there was all these "Write us a letter.

"Send us your game scores," whatever.

How much of that did you interact with?

- Oh, all of it.

- All of it, yeah, I constantly read all the letters.

I constantly talked about

how we're gonna give responses to them.

- Yeah.

- In 1988--

- Me and a friend got together, and we created a game.

- Mm-hmm. - And we sent a letter.

And I'm pretty sure we sent it

to whatever address we saw in here.

- Mm-hmm.

- You know, these were sent to Nintendo one time.

I told him the whole story, start to finish.

I traveled a very long way and waited a very long time

to ask this man in particular for one favor.

What I would love is for you to test a new NES prototype.

- It's been a couple of years

since I've seen an NES prototype, but I would love to, yeah.

- And I want to know, from the person

who made these decisions,

in 1988, would this have made that cut?

A 30-year journey ended here.

30 years ago, this same man probably saw

the abstract illustrations of a couple of kids

from Central New York.

And he probably found their passion cute and endearing.

For better or for worse, I had to know if he still worked

for the company, what would have been the verdict?

- With what I've seen,

you're definitely on the path towards getting something

that could be certified for play on the NES.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- These ideas dreamed up by the eight

- Absolutely, absolutely.

No, totally cool stuff.

Totally cool, fun stuff.

Like, who wouldn't want to play a game like this, right?

- You just validated the last 30 years of my life.

So thank you for that.

- Thank you.

That brings us to the end of our story.

Matt bought an NES, as promised,

and he found out it was about more than just nostalgia.

He began to enjoy new experiences for the system.

Meanwhile, our vagabond coder, Josh,

continued to add new features

to our screen development tool.

That way, other people could use it

to see their visions come to life on the NES, too.

Elizabeth decided to expand the universe she'd created

for Mystic Searches in a way that wasn't so limited.

She's currently creating a whole book

of lore based on that universe.

What about Austin?

His involvement and encouragement was the catalyst

that made this project possible in the first place.

I'd like to think that it was working on Mystic Searches

that inspired him and eventually compelled him

to start looking at projects from his own youth

to breathe some new life into.

Me, I've been passing on what I've learned

to a new generation of creators.

And by that, I don't just mean how

to develop new NES games.

When faced with the fact

that they're impossible or impractical or juvenile,

most of us let our greatest ambitions just disintegrate,

which is a shame, because they define us

and our relationships with the people around us

and our perspective of the world in ways

that we could never fully appreciate.

The fruits of those ambitions become our humble legacy.

And speaking of legacy, many have asked what's next.

Make some music, go back to writing,

bring Mystic Searches to the Super Nintendo?

Well, for starters, I'm gonna have

to slow down a little bit, because I'm currently working

on a completely different kind of pixelated adventure.

But I'll leave this story with somewhat of an open ending.

How does the epic saga of Mystic Searches conclude?

Hello, this is Richard with Nintendo.

I'm calling for Joe to talk to you

about your interest in Developer Program.

If you can, just give us a call back

at 425 , 55, thanks.