Mark Long - Shrapnel: Building The First AAA Shooter Game On The Blockchain

Full transcript: Mark Long on London Real

2:34 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mark Long. The entrepreneur, gaming industry veteran, producer, and author. You are the co-founder and CEO of Neon Machine, a production company that aims to bring the best in game development to the world of film and television.

2:59 Over the past 27 years, you produced 32 games on virtually every major media platform, from Sega Genesis to Sony PlayStation to Oculus Rift, and served as the head of interactive at both HBO and Microsoft’s XCloud. You served as a major in the U.S. Army, are a member of the Hollywood Producers Guild, and wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Silence of Our Friends. Your latest project, Shrapnel, is the world’s first blockchain-enabled first-person shooter game.

3:27 It’s built on Avalanche and combines the best of Web2 gaming with the rewards and ownership provided by Web3. You believe that Shrapnel will define a new era of gaming and help bring massive adoption of the blockchain. Mark, welcome to London Real. Thank you for having me, Brian. It’s great having you here.

3:46 I just want to start by saying that Neon Machine is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures. It’s the world’s first media-powered investment firm where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge Web3 and AI companies while giving our partners like you marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers, and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network.

4:10 Mark, we are beyond excited to be part of this journey with you. So let’s jump in. You’re a smart investor. We are. Tell me about your latest game, Shrapnel, and let’s just jump into it.

4:22 Why is it different than anything we’ve seen in Web3 gaming so far? You know, Shrapnel is something I’ve wanted to do forever. Like, the idea of making a game your own is something, even as a developer, I really enjoyed. Like, in the early aughts, I would come home from the studio making my own game, and I would go home, and I would mod games of the era, right? Like, Half-Life 2 and America’s Army and GTA.

4:51 And I was just thrilled if, like, 11 people would play my map, right? Even though I’m making games for millions of people back in the studio. There’s something inherently joyful about making a game you love your own and getting to create your own. On top of that, I watch my own boys start by playing Minecraft, you know, where they could build their own worlds, make their own content. Then age into Roblox, which is kind of like the Legos of game creation.

5:21 And then, as you become more competitive as between, you age into Fortnite. And now, Fortnite, over 50% of the engagement or the content in Fortnite is made by other players, not made by Epic anymore. But when you get 18 to 35, the core demographic, there’s nothing for you to age into. And I’ve always thought, in these two generations of gamers, with all these kids wanting to be, if you ask them, they’ll say, what do you want to do when you grow up? I want to be a game developer, right?

5:52 Why is nobody making a platform to make a professional level of game? And I think players are finally ready for that. Web3 embraces that concept further because Web3 is about ownership, transparency, frictionless internet money. And the other thing I observed was that, you know, with the advent of free-to-play in the last decade, we’ve gone from getting in a car, driving to the store, buying a disc, putting in a machine. And then when I’m done with it, taking it to GameStop and trading it in for other games.

6:30 And now everything is digitally downloaded, and most monetization is in-app purchase. You’re buying skins, cosmetics, upgrades, XP, that kind of thing. But you never really own any of that stuff you buy. You don’t get to have the GameStop experience. And Web3, Blockchain specifically, provides for that.

6:51 It’s free database technology that has all these powerful attributes. And so embracing that allows us to provide novel game experiences to players that are well beyond the first wave of egregious free-to-play or, sorry, played-to-earn games. That’s not really a thing, right? It was just a Ponzi scheme, really. And so when we put all these things together, and I work with my team, I said, this is the next generation of gaming.

7:25 And just like free-to-play, where developers and players were initially very dismissive of it, I see the same thing in Web3 gaming. In Web2, it was like, oh, those are just crappy knockoffs of a better game that I can play. You know, they were Korean titles that weren’t even translated. They were free, and that was the attraction. But within 10 years, the entire industry had shifted over completely.

7:53 And I think the same thing’s going to happen with Web3. But the big problem has been is that the games haven’t been good enough. It’s just been that simple. I was in Dubai a year ago at JITEX, the biggest technology conference in the world, and I was on stage moderating a panel on Web3 gaming, and there was one kind of Web2 guy, and he just called everybody out on the stage and says, nobody wants to basically do DeFi trades on your tokens. Nobody wants this nonsense.

8:22 They want to play a game. And everybody was left speechless because they couldn’t give an example of a AAA game or something that was fun to play. That’s because these games originally came out of Web3 developers. They’re not game developers. Do you know how hard it is to make a video game, let alone a successful video game?

8:42 So no one had tried it yet. These were all DeFi guys or people just trying to make money by doing a rip-off of CryptoKitties or whatever it is. So yes, we were one of the first, and my team saw it as a blue ocean of opportunity once they saw the barrier to entry, which was primarily regulatory, right? Microsoft, they can’t own crypto right now, so how are they supposed to integrate that into the Xbox Live system? It’s going to be several years.

9:11 And so we looked at it and went, we’d be stupid not to swing for the fence. You either do an RPG or a multiplayer FPS. Those are the two biggest genres in the industry. You can achieve billion-dollar-a-year revenue with those genres. Normally, that would be suicide, right?

9:29 I might as well just take the money out in the parking lot and set it on fire rather than actually try to do that. But Web3 has created this opportunity for us and a barrier for them. And I think something you told me before is that with Web3, you can take a much smaller audience that would normally be required in a Web2 game and still create the kind of revenues that you’re talking about. Sometimes a tenth or a hundredth of the side of the audience because it’s Web3.

9:55 Is that something you stand by and why is that? Yeah, I learned a lesson several years ago. I mean, like over 10 years ago, I worked with this guy to try and acquire Second Life if you remember that early metaverse. And you might ask, why the hell would you ever do that? The thing is a mess.

10:11 Even 10 years ago, it was a mess. And at the time, they only had like 110,000 monthly actives, but they were doing 125 million gross a year, 25 million Ibata. And when I learned that, I was like, how the fuck is that happening, right? Well, when you got into the economy, you realize just taking a microtransaction fee when you take fiat into the game and fiat out and also whenever players trade, sell, rent with each other, you can produce this insane economy of scale.

10:45 And the same thing happened with free to play. You tend to forget this, right? The average player, the highest monetizing player in what we call premium games is about $200, $250 a year. Xbox monetizes their players better than anybody else. Tencent, which is the biggest game company in the world, they make $10 per player a year.

11:11 When you bring Web 3 in, you’re going to see an order of magnitude increase because you’re creating an economy that everybody shares in, everybody’s trading. Right now, everything’s a walled garden, but just imagine a world where I can trade, rent, sell, auction, all these items from one game into another. It’s going to just pour gasoline on the bonfire that is the game industry already. If you thought the game industry was big, wait till you see what happens after Web 3.

11:48 And I think I predict this will be the first breakthrough of commercial use of this DeFi and Web 3 technologies. Right now, I challenge you to point at more than Coinbase and tell me that a hugely successful DeFi company that’s popular with the average person, it just doesn’t exist. Games are going to be that breakthrough, and the first games that have the kind of production die as we do are just different and fun to play. And by the way, I need to say that’s what it all comes down to.

12:27 It doesn’t matter if it’s Web 2 or Web 3. It has to be fun first. It’s not a fun game that I want to play with my friends. It doesn’t matter what it has. That’s what our team is focused on.

12:40 That’s where we approach Web 3. Not, how can we make more money? What can we do with this technology that is novel for players that they’re going to really enjoy? When did you start working on this game? Gosh, two and a half years ago.

12:58 But I’ve been thinking about, I bought shrapnel.com in 1995, and the running joke with anybody that works with me is like, oh, let me guess, it’s called shrapnel, right? So I’ve been trying to make this thing for that long, but it was really only until blockchain technology appeared, because it’s free database technology. So three years. Yeah, that long, yeah. But also, that’s short to create a triple-A game from scratch.

13:27 Yeah, but that’s true. But remember, we don’t have to build a 40-hour single-player experience. We’re only building a single multiplayer map. It’s a giant map, and it has all kinds of deep integrations, like a marketplace, a Web 3 API, all these things that we have to build from scratch right now that you can’t go out and license to integrate into the game. But still, it’s a lot less work than making the latest version of Call of Duty.

13:56 And then when we do that, we will release tools for the player. Already, we have a gamertag tool called Insignia, where you can mint your own gamertag that’s very popular with players. I want to be Black Reaper, and I love to be Black Reaper in every game, and I’m willing to pay for that. It’s a decal tool that allows you to make what we call Insignia, and so you can make really cool decals. You can apply on anything, your weapon, characters, any of that stuff.

14:27 Make and mint that. Eventually, we will be releasing a character creator tool, so you’ll be able to dress your character, and it’s unique because you’re going to dress them in the same way you and I get dressed. Character creators currently, you snap a lower body onto upper body and head, and that combinatorial produces uniqueness, but not the same kind of uniqueness. If I could put a head on this body, and then put this shirt on, and then that jacket over that, and then this plate carrier, so I’ll be able to produce crazy, unique capabilities.

15:03 And then finally, the editor, we are modifying the professional version of the Unreal 5 editor for players to be able to make their own maps. And I have seen, when you allow gamers in particular who are just obsessive, the ability to crowdsource a design, they’re going to make something, I’m not kidding, a million times better than we ever are, because you’re going to have hundreds of people trying to improve on a map that we gave them the kind of atomic structure in the pieces so that they could be successful to put it all together. And then eventually, and sorry to go on, because this is the thing I’m very excited about, but also generative AI on the horizon.

15:49 You’ve already seen what you can do with 2D images where we’ve already seen the emergence of text to 3D, so you can just enter a prompt and get a gorgeous 3D, what we call static mesh model, like a exploding barrel, and then I can mint it, put it up in the marketplace, and then all of us that are playing it, oh, I love that exploding barrel. I’m going to put it in my map, and the blockchain provides attribution to that creator so no matter what happens to that barrel going forward, all the map players that use it, we have a player reward system with our token that allows them to share revenue. And the picture I help you get is everybody suddenly becomes aligned in a really interesting way.

16:35 The developer, the player is also the developer, also shares in the revenue, also is part of governance because that’s a part of blockchain as well. And so for the first time, you’re kind of really collectively working together with the community, which is what the community wants all the time. Game communities are constantly telling developers to fuck off and just do this one thing, and the developers are off in their own world and developing things in secret, and then, ta-da, and everybody goes, we hate that, why would you do that?

17:11 You had to engage with your community earlier and giving them the chance to actually vote on the roadmap, that’s just going to be so powerful. It’s very exciting, as you could see. Yeah, super exciting. Do you have the best game out there right now in Web3? Of course we do, no.

17:30 I’m very excited to play two other games that I think are on par with us. Off the Grid, which is led creatively by Neil Blomkamp, the science fiction director of Elysium and District 9. That thing looks gorgeous. And Dead Drop, led creatively by Dr. Disrespect, this famous streamer.

17:52 And each of our three games are radically different, but I’m excited to play their games. I’m excited to see what they’re going to do with Web3. I’ve never thought that I was competing with other developers. As I said earlier, how hard it is to make video games. I can give you all the money, here’s the game design document, good luck, and chances still are that you wouldn’t find an audience with whatever you create.

18:19 It really takes seasoned teams that really understand what they’re doing and bring protocol and process and discipline and rigor to what is some of the most complex software development I think you can do. Because we’re always on the cutting edge. I mentioned blockchain and generative AI. That’s insane to add all these things, but that’s what game developers do. All right, I want to play a trailer so people can kind of see what this game is all about.

18:49 Do you want to set this up at all, or should we just play it? I just want to say I produced this with Jerry O’Flattery, former art director at Epic, and he’s just a supremely skilled director. And I wrote it, and it’s an insane idea. Let’s do this as a single shot. And he said, you’re fucking crazy.

19:11 That would be so cool. All right, on that note, roll trailer. So what did we just see there, Mark? That you basically see the game in two minutes and 30 seconds, right? You play one of these operators, a meth operator, mercenary extraction force.

22:14 He’s in something called the sacrifice zone. And what’s happened in the near future, this is like 2038, an asteroid nearly missed the Earth, just barely missed it. Hits the moon instead, fractures it, and the resulting ejecta coalesce into rings that extend all the way to Earth now. And so as the Earth rotates into these rings, there’s a daily meteor shower, this narrow band on Earth that’s hit with it every day. And so all the governments of the world are forced to evacuate this zone, the sacrifice zone.

22:50 Then it’s soon discovered that within the moon rock that’s falling as meteors, there’s chunks of this asteroid. And it is a extremely rare and valuable mineral. It becomes a conflict mineral, because the original contractors that were hired to protect the zone, protect life and property, turn into mercenaries, because a single chunk of this sigma, that asteroid, could be worth a million dollars. And so the game’s actually seeded with these glowing green crystals, and that’s what you’re after.

23:27 But there’s other players in the game, and this being an extraction game, I don’t win by murdering everybody else in the level and being the last one alive. I win by getting out alive with the most loot. So I might not even engage with you. I might try to avoid you completely. Or I might hang back, and each extraction is called, and players have to run in to get out on the drone that you saw.

23:51 I might wait, hang back, pop you, and then take everything you’ve got, and then go out. And what it produces is kind of a poker effect, where we just played around, you took everything from me, now I’m mad, and I want to go back and get what you’ve got. And then there’s always one guy who’s killing everybody, and we all want to team up against him and throw on top of that that all these NFTs, all the gear that I take away from you, has real world value. I think it’s very, very powerful.

24:25 There’s a reason people sit in front of a slot machine for two hours just pressing a button. It’s not because that’s fun. It’s because there’s $20 or $100 in there, and you might win it or lose it at any point. So I think you combine core competitive gaming with real world value in the assets, and you’re going to have something completely unique. Let’s talk about that real world value, because you just made a really interesting analogy to a slot machine.

24:51 The fact that that’s fiat money, you know, Yankee dollars, changes the whole experience. Because if it was points, people wouldn’t sit there for days on end, or hours on end playing slot machines. And that maybe has been the missing component in games, where there wasn’t real fiat value that I could get from that literally right away. And your token is live now, so technically I really can turn that into cash. And that changes the way I engage with the game, changes the way I feel about it, changes even the decisions I make as a game player.

25:21 Yeah. I think easy existence proof of this is really e-sports tournaments, where it’s really exciting to see skilled players play for money. They’re playing for a prize pool, right? So you can see, oh, this would be amazing, especially if I could do it at a regular player level. But it’s a crazy experiment.

25:44 Like, you know, mixing core competitive, which is already, you know, these are hardcore players that are obsessive, and real world money, you know, that’s going to be a very, let’s say, volatile mix in the beginning. Addictive? Addictive, certainly, but I think more, these communities, you know, they can turn toxic because these players are so competitive. But again, one of the advantages of Web3 is you’re aligning everybody again. For example, if you’re a complete dick in Counter Strike, you can get banned, but then you just come right back in with the new email address.

26:26 If you get banned in a Web3 game, you’re permanently banned, and we can also take away, you know, everything that you’ve got. That is a very extreme end, but if you’ve got extreme behavior, that solution just doesn’t exist in Web2 gaming currently. How can you ban someone? Because ID identification is still a little tricky in Web3, right? Well, you have to K-Y-C AML, right?

26:50 And by the way, we are not going to create that barrier for players. Our mantra, again, is game has to be fun, has to be a frictionless Web2 experience, and then as you start winning, you gain skill and start amassing NFTs. We’ll send push notifications to you. Hey, you’ve got $20, $30, $40 worth of stuff. If you’ll just K-Y-C, we’ll give them to you.

27:16 We’re holding them in a custodial wallet. That’s a powerful economic incentive where I don’t have to explain anything, any of the benefits to the player. They just, you know, figure it out on their own, and then they could do whatever they want with it. You know, they can exchange it for money. They could take it over to another Web3 game.

27:36 They can spend it inside this game, create new things. That’s why I think opening up Web2 to Web3 is just going to really revolutionize gaming, because suddenly all games are going to be interconnected in this way through marketplaces. I use a metaphor of, you know, coins are kind of going away, cash is going away. But, you know, remember coin machines and you go into the grocery store and you have a jar of all these coins and you dump them in. It sorts them, takes out the bus tokens and Canadian, you know, coins, and then it gives you $95 for your $100 worth of coins.

28:16 And you’re happy with that transaction, right? Same thing I think will happen with NFTs. A game like ours will just be full. Literally everything is almost in NFT in the game, right? So you play it for a couple of years.

28:28 They’re like, I’m done with this. I want to play this new exciting game. You’ll be able to take this box of NFT Legos and just dump them into what’s called an automatic market maker in a marketplace, meaning I don’t have to do an eBay style where I put one thing up, you know, one Lego, auction it. I can just dump everything in and then I get money out or crypto out and then I go play something else. Why is that good for me as a developer?

28:58 Because that player is going to come, they’re going to turn around, the marketplace is going to turn around and sell for $25, $250 worth of NFTs, like the gold pack or the platinum pack, right? Then they’re going to come into my game and I already know they monetize, right? Because they’ve spent money on game. The kind of dirty secret of free-to-play is a very small percentage of players actually pay. It’s like 2% to 11% on mobile.

29:29 It’s like 10% to 24% on PC and console. But that’s still a very small number. And so you can cash out all your stuff with you and then move to another game and that’s just another way of just locking all your value and then being able to go. Yeah, because right now I bought all this shit in this other game and it’s stuck in this game. Indeed, Ethereum was created in part by its founders because he was an insane World of Warcraft player and he got his character nerfed by the company and he was really pissed off about it.

30:12 I put a lot of time and money into that thing and you just nerfed it? I want to own this. And that was the genesis of Ethereum that he wanted to digitally own a virtual item. Right, and now you’re finally building a game for him. Yeah.

30:27 Right, you’ve got to get Vitalik in there playing. Yeah. How important was it to launch the Shrapnel token, which I did on the 9th of November? It’s done very well. I think it peaked about 6x up and it’s kind of been going between 4x and 5x and 6x.

30:42 So it’s had a lot of appreciation. How important was it to launch that token? Why did you need to launch it? And then again, you’re in America. What are the issues?

30:52 Are there regulatory issues? How are you going to use this to make sure this game continues to function going forward? First of all, we generated the token, token generation event April 29th. So the token’s been out there for a long time. And then in March, May, April timeframe, we began seeding the community with the token.

31:13 So we give the token away. An important distinction is we airdrop the token on the community. We don’t sell the token. The token performance that you described, that’s just players speculating on its future value. And that’s not something we’re concerned with.

31:31 We believe you need to focus instead on its utility. That’s how a token’s value becomes important to its player. Like, what can it do? And if you think about it, if this revolution happens, then what we’ve seen in the past, you know, tokens launch, rampant speculation by DJs over it is all going to go away. It’s instead going to be related to, well, what, well, first of all, is that a fun game to play?

31:59 And then what can you do with it? And what other ecosystems is it bridged to? Because all of that’s now more important than anything else. Okay. But you did list on an exchange so some people can buy it if they need to get it to use as a utility.

32:15 Yeah, Americans can’t buy it because of regulatory restrictions that we hope will change. But in the rest of the world, you can go on to an exchange and buy it, you know. Okay. But it was important to have it because it’s a crucial building block of this entire Web3 experience. Yeah, that’s where we’re focused.

32:34 It’s not really on the value of the token. We’re focused on building it into our ecosystem, understanding how it works with the economy. We have to get it into players’ hands to understand how they’re going to use it. You know, virtual currencies have been a well-established paradigm since Mario, right, with the gold coins then. There’s always been virtual currencies.

32:57 So they never had real world value. And so if you think about it, you’re actually creating an economy like a government has an economy with deflation, inflation, all that. And it’s a really complex thing. So it has to be released incrementally and then understood as you add each one of these things. As evidenced by like Axie Infinity’s two tokens and, you know, their deflation and how that entire thing collapsed.

33:25 It’s a pretty complex problem that I personally have never worked to develop. So only a few people on our team really understand how to do this. The tokenomics and all of the issues behind what you do with a currency itself. Yeah, less tokenomics and more the economy itself. Got it.

33:45 Let’s talk a little bit more about the game and how you promote it because I’ve seen things that you’re doing that I’ve not seen done in games, especially Web3 games, and that’s this kind of live action aspect where you’ve got people like in these environments that I guess mimic what’s going on inside of shrapnel in this zone. And you’ve also put in some of your Twitch influencers into these live action shots. And I guess it comes with your deep experience of how you can captivate, I guess, potential players’ attention.

34:19 We’ve even got a clip that shows some of the live action. Let me play this clip and I want you to come back and explain why you’re doing this because, I mean, I was kind of blown away to see it and it really intrigued me. So let’s play this clip and you can see some of the live action. So when I first saw this, I had to like squint my eyes and I was like, is this CGI? I know these are real people.

35:04 And I know some of them were like an influencer. And I even think you did an obligatory cameo just like Hitchcock used to do on his movies in there. What’s going on here? What’s the purpose of these assets? Talk to me.

35:16 So this is a transmedia marketing plan that we have. Today, you and I are immune to clicking and installing something. That just doesn’t happen. Influencers are the tail wagging the dog in the game industry first. We tend to play what my favorite streamer is playing and what my friends are playing.

35:38 So it was important first that we integrate Myth, Ali Gamari. And he’s a terrific guy who’s really curious about game development himself. And these guys sometimes secretly get asked by big game developers, hey, would you play this game and give us feedback? And they do that and then they completely ignore their feedback because it’s usually too late. So we brought him in at the earliest stage because a thing we call gun feel, like how does the weapon respond?

36:08 How fast is it? Muzzle climb, bullet hit reaction, all of that is something you want to really, really fine tune. And here’s a guy that spends his life playing video games at a professional level, perfect to get their input. But transmedia is really a fancy word for telling a story over multiple media in an asynchronous way where the normal, maybe Marvel way is the origin story comes out and then you have the sequel and then you bring the other characters into this world.

36:45 It’s a very well-established performative structure that there’s almost nothing left to excite you about. Transmedia instead spreads the story across all these and there’s no what they call platforming. I don’t retell a story in a comic in a live action. Instead I tell a completely different piece. And you often also deliberately create gaps in the fiction where the comic reader, the video watcher, the gamer goes, they didn’t really explain that and it’s kind of important.

37:20 What’s going on there? So that makes me curious about it. So what you just saw was some behind-the-scenes live action, green screen and hybrid, meaning we used a virtual volume. And in the green screen, by the way, it wasn’t straight-up normal green screen. We’re doing something called Through View with the production company Stargate where if you looked in the camera viewfinder, you’d see that the graphics were being merged in real time in the film.

37:50 So we’re using the actual game graphics for the special effects in a live action piece. And all those characters are defined in a 120-page transmedia Bible where we describe this whole world, all the characters that are behind it, and these live action videos are going to be four that are 10 to 15 minutes long each that tell kind of a Rashomon perspective, story of operators operating in the sacrifice zone. So even that told out of order and from different perspectives, I think it’s going to be interesting.

38:32 But this is how modern pop culture consumers are. We are incredibly sophisticated at this point, right? And so if I discover a franchise I love, we become like information hunter-gatherers. Like I go off now, like before Napoleon comes out, like, oh, well, now I want a Waterloo. That’s right, you know, that’s what happened.

38:53 I go off and learn all the, or Oppenheimer may be a better example, like this kind of almost obscure character who we knew was the father of atomic bomb, but I don’t really know anything more about that. But we all went off and, you know, wicked and learned more, and did you know the hydrogen bomb and all that? So if you, now we’re going to create a modern franchise, you have to provide for all of this. And if you don’t think about it ahead of time, this has happened to me, you have a successful title and you find you’ve painted yourself into a corner.

39:27 It’s like, oh, fuck, we killed that guy off and we actually need him, you know. So now I guess we’re going to have to go back in time to a point that’s less interesting. So if you take the time ahead of time and you plan all this out in a transmedia Bible, which I did with Mike Suarez, one of the founders of Rockstar, Mike and I worked on this for several months, and then you can hand it off to a writer of a comic or a live action video and say, do whatever you want with these characters, just be consistent with them.

40:02 And we didn’t tell plot arcs, we only told character stories. That way you can take two characters and go, this is the revenge story, or this is lone wolf and cub. This warrior has to protect this child to get them from A to B, which as a creator is so much more interesting than being told, well, you’ve got to rate the sequel and here’s everything that I need you to do. It just doesn’t produce as interesting a media. So I know it looks insanely ambitious from the outside, but we’re being very clever by reusing game graphics and the leader of the team in LA for Epic that makes the Unreal Engine came on set one day and he was like, holy shit, dude, you’re the first guys to do this, do you know that?

40:50 And I was like, wow, actually I didn’t know that and it’s super cool to know because we’re pretty psyched about what we’re doing. And way do you see the composited shots, when you see them on green schemes, you can’t really tell what’s going on. Unreal 5 is just, the lighting model is so beautiful now. It looks absolutely like they’re in that environment. Wow, and you were the first person to do that.

41:14 We should be the first to have done that, yeah. There should be coming out early next year, we’re cutting the series right now. Okay, yeah, you’re describing exactly how I felt because I was left asking questions, like what is that and who are they doing and that character doesn’t look like a character I saw before and there wasn’t this, maybe ultra congruency that we get with these Hollywood franchises. They tell you the story and they retell you the story and it almost treats your audience like dummies to a certain extent.

41:44 Because you’re worried about filling all the gaps and trying to appeal to 90% of the audience. But instead, what you’re doing is sparking curiosity. I’m so with you. When I find a show that where I’m watching with my spine, I say, we’re ready to really kind of pay attention to what’s going on, I’m so much more satisfied because we’re such sophisticated visual consumers. And I didn’t really mention any of the comics.

42:08 We produced over 12 individual comics as well that explore all these characters’ worlds. In shrapnel? Yeah. And a cool thing about a comic I learned early on, I’ve written a couple of graphic novels, as a producer when someone says, we could go on the moon and we could do this, like, oh man, that’s really expensive and not sure about that. And I was working with the comic editor, he said, Mark, you can blow up a planet.

42:33 And it costs the same as to draw a guy sleeping in his bed, right? So comics have this incredible expansive potential. You can go do things like I said, blow up a planet where you just couldn’t do that in the video game or the live action series. But as we expand this world and you become a community member or a friend of the franchise, you’ll be able to go back and discover all of this. How do I get my hands on the comic book if I’m a player?

43:04 Oh, you could just go straight to our website. And buy it there? No, it’s free. Okay, go and consume it. Yeah, we’ve actually got a comic reader so you can read the comics.

43:12 How many different media verticals, is that what you call them? Make up this game. Like, there’s a comic book. Obviously, I can play the game. I can watch these live action videos.

43:24 Like, what else is coming? Is the musical coming soon? We’re planning for success. So that’s somebody else’s decision. If we’re successful enough that it deserves a live action series or feature film, we’ve thought about characters that could be used in that category.

43:47 But that’s up to somebody else. And I know sometimes it sounds overly ambitious. I’m guilty of being a creative overachiever, I think. But it really is exciting to work in multiple media. You’re just such an expanding experience, like learning about comics.

44:09 For example, comics are a very short form of storytelling that’s visual as well, right? So when you write the manuscript, you have to say, page four, four panels, panel one, medium shot, Mark’s in the foreground, he’s mad, Brian’s in the background, he looks sad. You have to describe all these things. And as a creator, it was a big lesson in, oh, I have to actually go off and learn cinematography to be a comic creator, because you’re framing things in a cinematic way.

44:46 And I can tell you, if you don’t learn cinematography, the comic will come out and you’ll look at it and go, I don’t know, it wasn’t that interesting. You won’t say, oh, it’s because they didn’t follow normal film grammar, but that will be your experience. Each one of these media overlap into the other. Anyway, comics, I really encourage you, if you’re ever interested in doing a graphic novel, it’s one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had. I love this idea that if you force yourself as a creator into different medias, especially ones you’re not normally with, how it’ll probably just expand your brain, it’ll be like, oh my gosh, I never saw it that way, I never saw it this way.

45:23 And I know when we make a documentary film, it changes the way that I’ll have a conversation, it’ll change the trailer for this episode, and I’ll just be thinking about everything differently. And it forces me to be like, okay, think about it from different angles, where normally you just come in and repeat the same thing. That also just kind of dulls the mind a little bit. Exactly. And all these comics were written by members of the studio and their first-time authors.

45:47 I’m the only not first-time author. And they all, to a person, just love the entire experience, including going to Comic-Con and sitting on the other side of the table and saying, you know, who can I make this out to? It’s just, it’s terrific. So I just thought of the television series Atlanta. I don’t know if you ever watched Atlanta.

46:06 But that’s the one show where it reminds me of what you’re doing with shrapnel is in. I got to really pay attention because I don’t know what the hell is going on most of the time in that show. And if you’re not paying really close attention, it happens, and you’ll miss it. And then at the end of the show, I don’t want to spoil it, but I’m going to. It turns out the whole show is probably just a dream of one of the characters.

46:27 And it now makes a little more sense because the wackiest stuff happens in the assumption that you’re in this really normal world. And so that’s a great example of giving your viewers the benefit of the doubt that they’re actually much smarter than you think they are. They want this. They crave maybe this challenge. And now you’re doing it with these multiple forms of media and these gaps in the storytelling.

46:49 And meanwhile pulling them in, pulling them in. You mentioned the gun play and the exact feel and the trigger play of the gun and the reaction. And I want to play this last clip because you get really specific about this. And again, I think your obsession to detail is why you’ve been successful so far and why you will. And I want to play this clip because I think it shows a lot of that action, and then I think it shows some of the artifacts and the weapons afterwards.

47:16 Yeah, you’re going to see some of the first NFTs that you can buy right now. Okay, good. All right, so let’s roll this clip with the gun play and we’ll come back. So what did we just see there, Mark? Yeah, this is our expansion packs that we’re selling now for early access to the game.

48:45 So you can buy one of these three packs and you’re going to get original characters and NFTs that no one else is going to have going forward. You know, those kind of bragging rights, that kind of originality. And we’re doing this because we want a small number of the really invested community telling us how to make a better version of the game. We’re seeing some of our competitors, I think, make the mistake of just kind of throwing the gates open, give us your feedback, and I believe what is going to happen there is the more the syphilis hardcore players are going to end up dominating the conversation and feedback, and you’re going to get a game that’s too hard, just unplayable, unforgiving, because I know this community, I know how they speak and make their opinions heard.

49:41 So we’re going to be releasing in a measured way what we call shrapnel training exercises. So when the game comes out, that group of people will be able to play it for a weekend, then we take it down, make all the changes, put it back up next weekend, same thing happens, and then we start opening it up to larger communities. To the point in April, the game will go live 24 hours global. But you can imagine if we tried to do that in December, we would just get our assets kicked.

50:12 We’d have millions of people telling us millions of things. It’d be so hard to filter all of that into a coherent work list that’s going to improve the game. Okay, so this is a soft launch, so you can get the feedback, find out what you need to do and change, and then April next year is open up the floodgates. Yeah, if I can make a pitch for Web3 again, this is alignment with the community, right? They’re going to have their tokens give them the right to govern this part of the design.

50:49 That’s what they’re actually doing when they’re buying these packs. Okay, let’s talk about what’s under the hood because you chose Avalanche or Avax to power this game. Now, I had both founders on the show, Emin Gonsir and John Woo, who work at Able Labs, and they were one of the early layer one protocols that were out there because obviously Ethereum was too slow, the gas was too expensive, and to do finance, to do games, you needed something that would be 10,000 times faster and one 10,000th of the cost, and then especially in a game play.

51:25 Why choose Avax? How important was it that you chose it, and can you explain to people that don’t know Web3 why it’s important to have that layer one that is robust and fast and cheap? Yeah, so first of all, I want to say we love Avax, but two years ago when we made this decision, it was not a very clear decision to make at all. Avax was not known for games at all. It was a high-speed DeFi layer one.

51:53 Everybody at the time was trying to meet or exceed the Visa standard, which is 60,000 transactions per second happening on their global network, and so Avax set themselves up to have internet money that could run at that velocity or higher. In our game, Mark McCurey, our lead of blockchain, has estimated we’ll be doing up to a million transactions a minute in our game, so we had to have a system that could scale to that capability. The next thing that we loved is Avax is unique in that you can create your own subnet, which means I’m not relying on a public mainnet and all its problems, infrastructure problems.

52:37 I own my own nodes, and that means I can control gas prices, and I can also add nodes as the game comes successful to make sure we are never holding the player up. We don’t ever want the player to wait for more than one second for something to transact, and that’s one of the things that Web 2 developers that are sophisticated point at Web 3 and said, aha, this isn’t going to work, because gas prices can go insane as you’re well aware. Some popular PFP, NFT, can suddenly make gas go up to $70 to just mint a single one of those.

53:12 That could never fucking work, right? And this is why we went after Avax, and they’ve been a terrific development partner, and now a whole bunch of other games have jumped on, and I think we made a great choice. Wow. Yeah, that was brave to do that early on. And have they had more gaming companies start using their network?

53:34 Oh, yeah, I think they’ve got the best lineup now, Avax. And again, you can have your own chain and your own nodes, and that way it has that privacy aspect to it, and then you can develop it as you need to going forward. Right. Game developers love to own our own infrastructure. It’s just something inherent.

53:52 When you’re relying on other people’s infrastructure, and let’s say you release a new version of the game, and you get overwhelmed globally, you have to do a thing called hyperscaling, where you’re bringing on servers, like literally thousands of servers in seconds, in regions all over the world, that’s super complicated, and relying on even the very best infrastructure, AWS, Azure. That kind of cloud infrastructure often will fall over, and certainly you see it in Avax’s competition not to beat up on Solana or Polygon too much, but they very publicly have trouble standing up under that kind of traffic, and they’re still not completely stable. It’s true, and I mean Solana had a couple times when it was actually down, and then Polygon is used by a lot of different people for that, so it’s not obvious that’s the solution.

54:44 There’s not actually a lot of clear Layer 1 solutions out there right now. Right. There’s a few at the top that will be some winners, probably in each kind of sub-vertical, but it’s still not obvious exactly… Who’s going to win. …who’s going to win, and again, you hear a lot of names, but then there’s not always a developer community that comes along with it.

55:02 But I think it’s important to remind ourselves and your audience, like we’re at the dial-up modem era of Web3, right? At the beginning, you know, it was www…. Like you had to know, HTTP protocol made the internet possible. Now, I don’t even fucking think about that. Like it better just happen on my phone in a second, or I’m getting rid of that app, right?

55:23 Same thing will happen in Web3, like five, ten years from now, no one will know what ABACs or any of these Layer 1s are. They’ll just be using it transparently. Let’s go back to your earlier assertion, where you were like, look, I think you were basically saying that Web3 gaming is what’s going to bring people into this space. And like you said, what’s the most recognizable application that people use now, maybe Coinbase to buy and sell crypto? You know, I had Yatsuyo Banamoka Brands early on clearly tell me that gaming is bigger than all the music, all the movies, all the Hollywood franchises combined.

56:03 And most people don’t even realize that. And it’s the way to get the first billion people onto Web3, or even the first 100 million people, because that’s probably not happened yet in Web3. Do you believe the same thing? Oh, yeah. We’re at 180 billion plus this year, and all predictions are by like 2026, 2027, the industry will double again.

56:29 3.7 billion people on the planet are gamers because of mobile phones primarily. More than half the planet plays video games. Name me something else that more than half the planet does, right? Except, I don’t know, Facebook and Instagram, that kind of thing. So you’re an industry that scales, that is a perfect fit for this technology.

56:55 And I like to remind people, you know, when Web2, or when Free2Play came along, the early iTunes app store, right, there were video games, and we were in a price discovery phase in the first year, like are games $14.99, are they $7.99, are they $1.99? And then a game came out called MegaJump that did the next obvious thing, they gave it away for free. And do you know, within 10 months of MegaJump coming out, the entire app store went Free2Play? And I predict the same thing is going to happen with Web3.

57:29 You’ll have a couple of breakthrough titles. People will go, I want to own the stuff I put into the game. I could just do like I used to at GameStop and take all this stuff to a marketplace. Why would I play any of these other games? And you’ll see major publishers like Not Sony because they’re embracing blockchain, but Microsoft, it would be Tencent and others, fuck, we’ve got to get into this immediately just like they did in Web2.

58:01 And then they’ll end up paying a fortune for a company like Neon. Right, they’ll acquire probably. And so on that note, what is the future of Neon? What other games do you have planned? What scenarios do you have planned?

58:14 What is the exit if there is a plan? Well, first of all, it’s hard enough doing what we’re making, a competitive first-person military shooter. Like I said earlier, you might as well go shoot yourself rather than try and make one of those. If it wasn’t for Web3, it’s the most competitive category. On top of that, it’s like early Free2Play where none of this infrastructure, unless you license immutable or Forte or one of these ecosystems, you have to make all this stuff yourself.

58:47 You have to put together all the cloud services. Avax is just a very basic DeFi capability. So you have to have messaging layer on and off chain, database transactions, escrow, wallet, identity. And we built all that. We were very fortunate and we were able to hire Mark McCurey, former head of blockchain at Microsoft, former Senior Vice President Consensus joined us because he wanted to make video games.

59:15 Like that stuff’s cool, but this is cooler, right? And Mark McCurey comes in and because he had done this a handful of times for other Fortune 500 clients, like within a matter of months, you’re like, holy shit, dude, you built an entire API that plugs into Unreal and Unity. We can license this, and that’s what we’re going to do after the game comes out. It’s called GameBridge, code name GameBridge. It’ll have a different name when it’s released later.

59:44 But we want to license that. API is a new business after the title comes out. Other than that, we’re just completely focused on making travel success. We’re not looking at other games. I think our player community is going to invent new genres and new games.

1:00:03 Imagine for a minute that Battle Royale doesn’t exist and you and I got together on track and was like, dude, I have this idea where the map shrinks and it’s down to the last person out of 100. Imagine if our player community owned an entirely new genre invented by them and we enabled and participated in it. That’s our vision for what is coming next, what the next game is. What’s it like to run a gaming production company, studio? I’ve seen the behind-the-scenes where you guys are in rooms developing these games.

1:00:41 What’s it like to create something like this? What are the challenges that you have as CEO? As CEO, my life’s very different. I used to become CEO with my best friend, Joanna Alexander. We used to look at each other and say, remember when this was your dream job?

1:00:58 It’s so hard. There’s so many things I have to juggle. My head at the studio, Don Norberry, he’s really the guy making the game and running the team. Fortunately, everybody’s done a tour at Microsoft or one of the big other software companies, and they come with process and protocol and understanding that allows them to have a predictable methodology that makes game development very much more straightforward for them. It is cutting-edge software development, make no mistake about that.

1:01:38 It’s an entertainment product, so it either finds an audience or it doesn’t. That’s what we signed up for. How will you try to find an audience over the next six months? You’ve got influencers, you put out media out there to captivate people’s audiences. You’ve got a dedicated community on Twitter and some of these are the platforms.

1:01:59 What is the plan to take that to the next level? I’d like to say framework makes the game work. A way to make framework in a game is, to me it’s pretty simple. You have this idea, what if we had the sacrifice zone and you could shoot each other and it was this genre? Then as you implement it, you start finding it, dude, this is really, it’s high friction, I don’t like this.

1:02:23 Like this UI, it doesn’t work, it kind of makes me mad every time I have to touch it. You remove all the stuff that’s not fun over time and then if you do that correctly, what’s left is fun. So it’s kind of a subtractive process that you have to get comfortable with because everybody in software development wants to just keep adding things and really in my experience it’s subtracting things sitting down to the basis of fun. That’s what it always has come down to.

1:02:53 Is it fun or not? Then it’s easy to acquire players. If it’s not fun, then it’s hard and expensive to acquire players. And so subtract things, that’s the rule of thumb. At least in the beginning, yeah.

1:03:06 Yeah, that’s the rule of thumb. Find the core, the core moment-to-moment loops, the skills that you have to learn to get to the next level. Have a progression line that is linear, not hyperbolic. So, oh, I’ve done this one thing and now I have a new skill and I can do this new thing and unlock that. These are all the grammar we use in game design.

1:03:28 Now look, Bitcoin is now above 38,000 and people are talking about bull runs. We’ve also got the US still trying to figure out how it feels about crypto and we have an approved Bitcoin ETF. The SEC is still going after exchanges and things. First of all, how much does a rally in crypto help you? Second of all, how much does clear regulation in the US figuring out what the hell it wants to do with crypto help you or hurt you?

1:03:57 Regulation would be so helpful right now. The SEC going after individual companies and basically bullying them in lawsuits to get them to follow something called the Howey Test that was created during the Depression is supposed to be how we understand if this technology is a security or not. It’s ridiculous. But you have probably read, like I have the two pieces of legislation in the House and the Senate, they both look great. They both look like the Token Safe Harbor 2.0 proposal that came out a couple of years before.

1:04:33 I think that’s where regulation goes, where companies are allowed to create a token and it can be a security in the beginning. Maybe that’s one of the advantages of putting out a token. You could raise money to finance development but it needs to turn into a utility over some period of time and then you need to demonstrate that utility to the regulatory bodies and then they go, cool, you did what you said you were going to do. That’s how I think regulation is going to work for us.

1:05:06 And then I forgot the other part of your question. Well, let me comment on that because I agree. Every time I hear, again, sobering up the Howey Test, I’m always like, if I actually engage with you on that, I’m making a mistake because you’re trying to bring up some really old precedent to an agency that was created 100 years ago to deal with the ramifications of what happened during the stock market crash and the ramp up to that. We’re not there anymore. Security is not needed necessarily in that way.

1:05:32 My grandma can get on the internet and look up a stock. She couldn’t do that in 1931, 1933 when the Securities Exchange Act happened. I get really frustrated when I go down a rabbit hole in the SEC’s mind of how they justify things. Also, the organization was created to police and protect whereas the CFTC was created to empower businesses with derivatives that will actually create market value. So you have these two different ways of even looking at the world.

1:05:58 The first question, first of all, is the SEC and its current remit even relevant that way or helpful that way? And then the second of all, like you said, why are we talking about this Howey Test? That’s not the conversation we should be having. We should be talking about how can we create something like you’re talking about where, okay, we can empower these companies, but then also if they want to then not be treated as that security, how can it evolve? And I hope we have these discussions.

1:06:21 I’m very frustrated as an American to watch like China recognized Bitcoin as a currency or security, and well on their way to creating a digital currency. We’re lagging behind all the rest of the world and I firmly believe blockchain is going to have a bigger transformative effect and economic effect than even the internet has because it impacts the biggest parts of our infrastructure, finance. Which you just can’t tell me internet money isn’t a thing that is useful, right?

1:06:56 Yeah, it’s the only major technology development in the last 100 years with the US hasn’t led. That’s probably true. And now they’re way behind. I was at token 2049 in Singapore in October or September. There’s no bear market over there.

1:07:11 It was like crazy. 10,000 people there took me an hour to get in the damn conference. Meanwhile, you go to a Hong Kong blockchain week, retail is being embraced, everybody’s doing this, everyone’s building, everyone’s creating, and then you go back to the US and it’s like the dark ages. So it’s something that needs to be sorted. I know the people want it to be.

1:07:30 I think 35% plus of Americans own crypto and that it probably would have a hard time voting for a non-crypto candidate. So yeah, unfortunately it’s probably going to take longer than it should. You asked about Bitcoin bull market too. I agree that we’re at the beginning of that market for two reasons, the halving coming up in April. And then these ETFs, there’s a potential for trillion dollars to go into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other ETFs and they’re virtually guaranteed I think at this point for some, if not all, to be approved.

1:08:09 And then that cycle kicks off. Those speculators speculate on that cycle. Then as they hit their peaks, they move into altcoins, run that cycle back into the big coins again, and that’s what a bull run looks like for two years. So the tide lifts all boats and we’d love to see that happen. Yeah, I agree.

1:08:33 It’s happening now. Price goes up on no news. Before price was going down on no news. I was in finance for 15 years. This feels very, very bullish.

1:08:42 It does. Again, if you look at any portfolio manager in the world, what do they want? They need a non-correlated financial asset. Every institution is now agreeing that Bitcoin is one of those things and it is, run the numbers. So again, imagine 4% of most portfolios in Bitcoin and you have trillions of dollars going into an ecosystem with a $1.4 trillion market cap.

1:09:02 You don’t have to be an economics PhD from MIT to realize it’s going to raise tons of prices. It’s going to put a lot of interest in there and then get a lot of awareness there. I saw a tweet the other day that said, we’ve got 600 days left in the bull market. Make sure it counts. And I thought it was really a good thing to think that way because first of all, it’s important to know that it’s not going to be forever.

1:09:25 It’s going to probably hit higher highs in Bitcoin. There’ll probably be less dodgy things happening, but also some weirdness going on and then there will be a bear market after that. So let’s start acting that way and preparing that way. And I’m looking forward to that, bringing more people in the ecosystem. How OG are you on Bitcoin?

1:09:45 You know, there’s a picture on the wall there where I’m with Max Kaiser at his studio in London when he had the Kaiser report here. And he came on my show in 2013 because I tweeted out, who can teach me about Bitcoin? Because we were two years into London Real. And they were like, oh, it’s Kaiser. And I looked at Kaiser and I was like, nah.

1:10:05 I said, this guy doesn’t seem like he knows what he’s talking. I said, will the real slim, shady, please stand up, is what I tweeted back. And I don’t get it at Twitter Wars. But Max didn’t think that was very good. And so he came over.

1:10:15 He came like barreling through my door and we sat down. And Max is very crazy. But I became good friends with him and Stacey and I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013, I think. And he was always a proponent talking about it. And so I knew about it then.

1:10:29 And then we had a guy named Andreas Antonopoulos, who was kind of the Bitcoin Jesus, one of the early proselytizers of the ecosystem. He came on the show in 2015, 2017, 2019, talking about the future of the internet of money before there were stablecoins or DeFi or anything. So I had those conversations, but I never dove in. I was too busy doing London Real. But I was there and I bought the coins and I was aware of it.

1:10:55 And then in 2021, when I lost the race for mayor, we just went all in. And I’m so glad we did. And it’s so aligned with what we believe in, with freedom of speech, because there is no freedom of speech without property ownership, whether that’s physical property or digital property, same thing. And so I find this community is so aligned with London Real values. When I go to these conferences, like I just get mobbed with people because these are the people that speak my language.

1:11:23 They question authority, they question governments, they question fiat currencies, they question mandates. And so, and they’re into owning their own property without a government being involved. Yeah, boy, talk about the challenge to any government. If you challenge their fiat, you know, that is the one thing that they have the real control over. Exactly, that’s the way they control you.

1:11:45 Yes. Although it does, although you can’t ban Bitcoin either. And so it’s going to be a really interesting way. But you’re right. That’s the last thing the government wants is take away their fiat currency.

1:11:55 Just like the last thing the government wants is for you to take away his FTT token. So it’d be an interesting time. But I think we need to be talking about these digital property rights. At the same time, my daughter’s going to a university in America. She’s being flooded with all these Marxist concepts where you’re being taught, you don’t need to own any property.

1:12:17 You know, you don’t need to own anything going forward. And owning things is bad and capitalism is bad. And I think when people start to realize how your freedoms get taken away with that, there could be a reversal. Or not. I don’t know.

1:12:31 It’s an interesting time. And with Web3, we see those digital property rights. Whether that’s your identity, your browsing history, anything, potentially owning it. I think it’s a great parallel. You can also see Bitcoin as a deflationary instrument.

1:12:47 And you look at it next to fiat and you’re like, what’s going on here? Wait a second. For the first time ever, you can say, I had a guy named Jeff Booth who wrote a whole book about inflation. And he says, if you price everything in Bitcoin going forward, the price goes down. You price everything in dollars going forward, the price goes up.

1:13:02 So which one’s wrong or right here? So I think also just like AI, these technologies actually teach us things about ourselves. And that’s going to be some very interesting times these next 10, 20 years. I had an economist explain something people rarely talk about with digital currencies, which is the velocity of money. And so let’s say I give you $100 for some weed that you just sold me.

1:13:31 Then you turn around and you get your shoes shined and you tip the coffee girl and do all the things in your day to spend the $100. That money has a lot of velocity. It does a lot of good for people. If I take the $100 and I put it in a 401K, it does no good for anybody except a big corporation. So if we deconstruct money in this way, so it’s frictionless and even used to pay machines to use my PlayStation when I’m not using it is that frictionless, then you have insane velocity of money and everybody benefits.

1:14:09 I don’t understand. Well, I understand how the government works and some of the people in politics are not that bright. They need to have things explained to them and that requires the right kind of people getting their ear. AI, you talked about using it already in your games. And again, you’re on the cutting edge of the cutting edge by embracing technologies right away.

1:14:31 How do you feel like it’s going to change the future of game creation? And are you worried to a certain extent that it’ll take away a lot of what used to require people like you with experience and teams to create things? Yeah, what I’m seeing, first of all, is developers are using AI to generate concepts very quickly, but it’s almost like thumbnail rough sketches. They’re not ready to be used. And already, maybe like if you’re like me, I can already detect, oh, well, that’s not real.

1:15:01 That’s AI. You can just tell. But I firmly believe we have to protect developers’ jobs and get paid a lot to have the skill in the original vision that it takes to make assets in our game. But on the other hand, regular players that want to just create content in the community, I don’t want them to have to download Blender and learn 3D. It’s like, that is really complicated.

1:15:27 Photoshop’s really complicated. So it democratizes creation for regular players who make something we call UGC, user-generated content. So in our world, I want to embrace AI to enable players to make user-generated content. But at the same time, I want to protect developers from losing their job because somebody just wants to use AI to make some shitty art and bang out a game much less than anybody else could make it for. Do you think we should worry about existential risks of AI and it could kill all of humans in the next 20 years?

1:16:05 I have friends with Neil Stevenson, the science fiction author. I mean, Neil’s book club. And sometimes the subject has come up. And you can imagine the kind of people that are in Neil Stevenson’s book club. They’ve all got a brain as big as a planet.

1:16:22 So I sit back and listen. And I hear the existential argument and other people pooping it. I think the technology is going to be insanely transformative. We have no idea how different things are going to be as we begin to embrace AI on a daily level. And like all technology, sometimes it’s going to be good, other times bad, but it’s especially good for pornography.

1:16:50 Always is, right? I haven’t yet gone down that route with AI. I haven’t seen any AI porn yet either, but I’m sure it’s coming. I’m sure it is. Mark, you’ve got a fascinating background.

1:16:59 I mean, you spent eight years in the service. You worked when you were there on a lot of these simulation technologies. I think when you got there, a lot of the simulation was based on aircraft and then you saw applications for tanks and for other battle. You’ve written a New York Times bestselling book about kind of race relations. And when you were growing up, I think in Texas, you’ve created comic books, you’ve been involved in movies.

1:17:23 I mean, there’s not a lot of Mark Long out there. I was wondering if you could talk about maybe some of the important parts of that journey and how it’s all somehow expressed in shrapnel. That’s true. I think it is. Yeah.

1:17:40 It’s interesting that you can see that. You know, I grew up middle class poor in Texas, really poor. And I went to the University of Texas. I’m a boomer, so it was back when you could actually afford college and not go into debt. But even then, I was poor enough that I couldn’t afford much college.

1:17:58 And my roommate was an ROTC, full-ride scholarship architecture student. And as far as I could tell, all he did was get stoned and march around in the stadium once a week in his uniform. And he got his college paid for. So I thought, this is great, I’ll do the same thing. So I had no idea what I was doing going into the Army.

1:18:17 That’s literally the thought I put into it. I graduated. I was like, oh, shit, I’m in the Army now. But I discovered elite forces later. And that’s a very different kind of Army.

1:18:28 But at the end of my career, I ended up working on a seminal project called SimNet. And it was actually the first use of internet combined with what you would call multiplayer gaming. So up until then, simulators were 40, $70 million computer graphics machines that were really only suitable for pilots, right? Because it’s very expensive to burn holes in the sky in a jet. And you could do very dangerous things in a simulator.

1:18:56 But computer graphics technology was coming down in price and accelerating rapidly. And in that project, they were able to network M1 tank simulators. And you could play a simulated battle with real tanks on a battlefield and simulated tanks and what they call man in the loop people actually playing. And I worked on an early simulation version of that. And that’s where I discovered computer graphics and early sun workstations and then read the words virtual reality for the first time and decided immediately that’s what I want to do.

1:19:35 That sounds exciting. So very deliberately steered myself through a succession of three laboratories, the last in Princeton, a Stanford Research Institute lab called Sarnoff. And I met my best friend and business partner Joanna Alexander there. We were the young kids doing virtual reality research in the early 90s. And Hasbro came through.

1:19:58 They had just watched the success of the Mattel Powerglove, the first VR application. And they wanted to make a home virtual reality system in 1991. And Hasbro stands for Hasenfeld Brothers, which was an amalgamation of all the competing toy companies, Kenner, WAMO, Parker Brothers. And by the way, all the board members just hated each other because they were competitors previously. But they decided to greenlight this $52 million project.

1:20:33 And we were too young and stupid to actually run the thing. So they said, great job. You get to be the evangelist. So Joanna and I flew all over the world trying to talk publisher developers into developing for the platform. And on one of those trips, we decided, I really love games, man.

1:20:51 This would be cool to own a game studio. Yeah, we should own a game studio. So I wrote a terrible business plan. I wish I had it. I raised money in New York from Nick Nicholas, the chairman of Time Warner, the guy who had merged Time and Warner.

1:21:07 And Nick was a terrific guy like Harvard. I think Yale undergrad, Harvard grad, ran Time, ran HBO for a while, then merged Time and Warner. But he had just been ousted in a board coup by Steve Ross, the slimy Warner Brothers CEO, just three months after they agreed to be co-CEOs. So I met him as he was getting kicked out of the Time Warner building but had a $45 million parachute. And he took us to the 21 Club for lunch and looked at our presentation and we walked outside and he said, okay, you got your money.

1:21:44 I’m the only guy you’re ever going to meet that had no idea what he was doing and raised money the first time he tried. So we ended up in Seattle where, at the time, it looked like that was going to be one of the bases of virtual reality research. And our first couple of games were VR games. And of course, they failed miserably because early virtual reality is horrible. And I learned a lesson, like, I don’t care how good you make a head-mounted display, this is never going to catch on because it’s just too socially isolating, right?

1:22:18 It’s cool, but it’s not that cool. And I’ve seen a number of game technologies come and go. So I don’t believe in that version of virtual reality. I do believe in auto-stereoscopic large-screen displays with voice and gesture and face recognition. I think how VR plays out.

1:22:37 And Vision Pro, the Apple’s device, do you think that will? I think it’s gorgeous, but I think what they’re doing there is this is really so high-end that only 100,000 to 4 million people total are going to have to be in the install base in two years. But they need to get it into regular consumers’ hands as they shrink it down to a pair of Wayfair AR glasses. Right now, it’s an iMac on your face. I think that’s what they’re doing.

1:23:02 Whereas Zuckerberg is more going for… He’s trying to go straight for the commercial version. And they may be the gameplay version. Yeah, Apple’s going to win. They’re going to shrink that thing down to a beautiful, elegant, lightweight pair of glasses, and we’re all going to be walking around in an AR world.

1:23:19 That’s not necessarily for games. That’s just an AR world. Yeah. But it’ll lead to games. Yeah, I think actually, just like the phone is good for games, but also very, very useful in so many other ways, AR is going to be that way too.

1:23:35 And you’re not convinced with what Oculus is doing. No, I think it did. You don’t think it happens. Just it’s too weird. The team, we all bought one a couple of years ago.

1:23:45 Somebody went in the Jurassic Park and went on the roller coaster, and we all used them for two weeks, and then I realized I didn’t put it on for a year. And I went home, and I just pulled up YouTube and I watched some videos at night, as opposed to stick this thing on my head. And I couldn’t figure out why, but I didn’t. And nobody else did. That’s the conclusion you made.

1:24:05 Yeah, that’s a perfect existence proof. When was the last time you put it on? Right. And I hate saying all that, because that’s how I got my start, and I was a true believer originally, but I don’t think it’s how it works. Trying to be honest.

1:24:22 Currently. Some people would say it’s the same with Web 3. Yeah. But you’re not buying it. No.

1:24:28 Right. In terms of how did I get into writing and producing, I said earlier, I’m just a creative overachiever. I love working in different media. The graphic novel, I produced a couple of graphic novels with Nick Sagan, Carl Sagan’s son. And through the experience, I was like, this is pretty cool.

1:24:48 I think I’d like to try and write one. And I grew up in Texas during the Civil Rights Movement. My parents are both civil rights activists, and we lived in the most racist neighborhood in Houston. Like, the Klan literally put flyers on your door. Hey, come on down.

1:25:04 Let’s burn across on Friday, that kind of thing. And he was a television news reporter covering the movement, and he became radicalized with a black professor on the TSU campus. And they decided to put their politics where their family were and we began going to the Third Ward, and they started coming into our neighborhood. And of course, I would get beat up, you know, for having a black family at my house, and God knows what happened to them as well. I like to think, my parents were, you might have the picture that they were courageous, but instead I think they were incredibly nice.

1:25:41 Their heart was in the right place, but they just put us all in danger. And anyway, the story is so much to me more complicated than the kind of magic negro or, you know, all the thing, the tropes in this genre where whites and blacks are played out in a particular way. And my experience was different. It was very gray, it was very naive, ambiguous, and the silence of our friends is that story told through my 11-year-old eyes. And then, surprise, it made New York Times Bestseller, and once that happens, you’re hooked, right?

1:26:21 I have to do it again. So I’ve written two others, and love screenplays. I love the discipline and format. A screenplay is 120 pages, a page, a minute. And it’s almost like haiku poetry.

1:26:37 There is a mathematical precision to when you’re a documentary producer, you know this has to happen by that minute, no matter what kind of film it is. And I love that structure, that helps me write. And then, two years ago, I wrote, I tried writing my first novel, and I wrote a satire of the game industry called The Killianaires. You can read it on Kindle. It’s kind of a Silicon Valley times a hundred.

1:27:09 Just the insanity. And there is a grain of truth to every single thing that happens in that story. It’s basically, you know, me exaggerating what happened to me in the game industry in the past 25 years. I’m sure everyone’s blown away that you have the time and the energy to be this creative, you know, because I would argue that most of your peers at these either Web 2 or Web 3 gaming studios are focusing on only the games. Yeah.

1:27:40 And so, is this a critical part of you being able to do the games? Do you have to use your brain in different ways? This is coming from you, which is a typical of triathletes. They’re all like this, right? Where you’re like a doctor or a lawyer or a media personality with zero time to have a hobby like that.

1:27:59 So, this is coming from you. I want to remind you. Fair enough. I think if you’re a creator, that art just wants it to be made. I wrote Silence with My Friends when we had a brand new one and a half year old and six year old and I have pictures of me holding a baby with a bottle typing like this at 3.30 in the morning because I was just excited to get that story out.

1:28:26 You can’t help yourself, I think, if you’re a real creator. It’s true. It’s true. Do you have any advice to encourage people? Because I think a lot of times people decide whether they’re artists or not.

1:28:38 You know, and for a long time, I excelled at science as a kid. I was a science fair guy and then the MIT kid. And back then, it was like, you do the arts or the sciences. There weren’t many people that crossed over and there was no YouTube then and stuff. But now that I’m older, I embrace this stuff and our latest film, I had to make it.

1:28:58 I didn’t have time to make it this year, but I had to make it and so we made it. But a lot of people out there maybe don’t give themselves that leeway or a lot of people feel the fear of judgment when they put out things. Even your own judgment. This isn’t good. You actually are your worst critic in the beginning because you’re staring at a blank page instead of just vomiting it out and then rewriting it because that’s how it works.

1:29:29 Neil Stephenson, my writer friend, says he gets asked, you know, what do I do to write my first novel? And he says, write it and then throw it away and write the real novel. So another friend of mine says, writing’s a verb. You just keep doing it. That’s how you get good at it.

1:29:47 Don’t self-center and maybe comics are the lowest barrier to entry of all these creative media. It costs almost nothing. You don’t even have to draw well if you decide you want to do the art. Well, but get out there and do it. There’s something about the permanence of a book, especially, that you’ve created and you can hand, oh, I wrote this 10 years ago.

1:30:13 It’s always going to exist, unlike all the video games. You can probably only play maybe two of the video games I’ve made because the systems are all out of date, right? That’s crazy. Yeah, I think Martin Scorsese said that the first time he sees a rough cut of his movie he throws up and I know exactly how that feels. When I see the first rough cut of our documentary, I feel so ill and sick to my stomach because it’s such a piece of total garbage.

1:30:43 It’s just so soul-destroying. But now that we’ve done it a few times, I know now it’s just like, okay, just keep going. Just follow the course. But for 80% of the process, it’s just so bad and it’s just so not working. And it’s such a poor expression of my idea.

1:31:04 And then with the right team and some great people involved like you guys had working on your trailer, it starts to evolve. And to where you’re like, okay, maybe I can actually show this to someone. And then you show it to them and you get some more feedback and you look at it differently and then at the end you produce something that’s an expression of what you wanted and it’s something that’s there for the ages. What you just said is so interesting to me that the idea, I definitely experienced this.

1:31:33 In the first version, it’s not what you wanted. It’s not what you had in your head. And I think what happens is you get better in a medium as you get to what you wanted in your head a lot faster and you find people that share your vision without even articulating it. They’re just like in sync with you creatively and you’re gonna get there. But it is magnificent when, and that trailer is really one of the only, honestly, one of the only experiences for me where that was exactly what I wanted it to be in the beginning.

1:32:08 There’s not a single second in it that I’m disappointed in and literally everything else I’ve ever done that was like, oh my God, don’t even show that to me, right? What’s your advice to people out there that want to create a game, that want to build something in Web 3? There’s a lot of probably young entrepreneurs and you’re no spring chicken, neither am I. But advice to these people in their 20s who want to do something like this, what would you tell them?

1:32:36 Well, we’re right on the era of video game development being democratized in the same way maybe that video democratized filmmaking. Suddenly anybody could do it and today certainly you can make a movie on your phone even with Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, all three of those, you can go off and begin. All the tools are there to make a different scale of game. In Fortnite, in particular, their creative mode, it’s training wheels on their editor. It’s easy to get something successful and no matter what you make, it’s going to be a battle royale game.

1:33:17 But just download the editor and begin experimenting. I can’t tell you how many level designers I’ve hired that taught themselves a level design in Unreal, Unity, or one of the other major engines and just did something completely cool. I’ll never forget this one guy, or two guys actually. One guy completely recreated the courtroom scene from You Can’t Handle the Truth and A Few Good Men in the Half-Life engine and it was just fucking amazing that he could do that.

1:33:49 And then another guy made a game level that was basically his bathroom, but you were only this tall. So you were running down the shower curtain and had to slide down this way and get up on the sink. It was just fantastically creative. It showed what he could do, but didn’t really do more than that. And he just taught himself to do it using the editor.

1:34:11 I think that’s what the guys at Epic and Unity have done for everybody, is beginning to democratize development. Wow, yeah, don’t wait for permission. That’s the advice I would give to people. I think so many times people wait to, oh, I’ve got to get the training class, I’ve got to get hired by the company. It’s like, no, just do it.

1:34:30 Make the film, build the game, do it. And that’s the way you’re going to learn. That’s a lecture by Michael Mann, the director-writer. Say exactly that. Really?

1:34:40 Exactly that. Stop trying to figure out how to break into Hollywood. Just do it. Go do it. Make it, and then Hollywood will find you because you made something cool.

1:34:50 Yeah, it’s full of film school right here in London. What’s the future of gaming? 20 years from now, 30 years, 40 years from now. What are we going to see people playing, especially on the cutting edge? I think if we took ourselves into that future, we would be, I don’t even think there’s a word to describe.

1:35:14 It would look like magic to us. I believe anything that you can imagine that technology is going to do, it will do. I actually think it happens in your home with giant wall-sized TVs that can fill your peripheral vision like an HMD, voice gesture, speech, face recognition so it understands all your emotions. Imagine watching a series, I don’t know, like The Sopranos. We have a central character, Tony Soprano, that all the action and dialogue revolves around.

1:35:49 But you are Tony Soprano. And you watch this kind of like a regular TV show, but there’s a particular shot or cinematic grammar where you know, oh, now I’m in control of what’s happening. And in real time, characters of HBO quality storytelling are saying, you know, what do we do, T? Do we knock him out? Do you want to keep him alive or what?

1:36:11 And you’re able to sit there and think about it like, no, let’s keep him. Let’s not whack him just yet, right? So can you imagine the power of, think about your very favorite TV series written excellently where you actually are a character in it and you experience everything in it? I think that’s what entertainment looks like in the future. Man, mind-blowing, really mind-blowing.

1:36:37 I look at my two sons, they’re six and seven years old, and I look at the way they interface with games and it’s so educational for me. I mean, I was tinkering on my Apple II Plus, playing Castle Wolfenstein, and every time I want to tell them to stop playing the game, I got to look myself in the mirror and say, I was all over that, and I played more than my mom told me to play, and I was kind of obsessed, and these were games with very low-quality graphics, although I don’t remember them being low-quality because the story was amazing. But my son Damon, man, he is so deep in these games.

1:37:07 He understands, you know, he knows how to transact. He probably helps him learn how to read and spell. He’s interacting with people. He’s trading. He knows he’s got a mythical.

1:37:19 He’s got an epic. He’s got this, and for him, he’s telling me the stories of everything that’s happening, and I’m thinking back to my childhood where I got to see the Rocky movies. Okay, that was like my entertainment, and occasionally I got to play Atari or maybe Nintendo if somebody had that, but I wasn’t creating inside of a game. I wasn’t interacting with this. It’s not a game, and when I see him playing a game, I’m like, stop playing games, but that’s not a game.

1:37:44 For him, this is entertainment. This is creativity. This is interacting with a world in a way that I never got to do that. So I’m trying to look at it as a completely different medium that he has this benefit, and he just comes alive when he talks about it, and he knows so much about it. He’s like the smartest man in the world when it comes to these Roblox games, and so I’m really enjoying learning about games through his eyes and kind of seeing what the future is.

1:38:14 And his friends are there, too. I think that’s a very important thing for parents to realize. Sometimes we just see a kid lost in a tablet, but you don’t understand. He might be interacting with 20 of his friends all at the same time, all doing. Maybe sometimes something my sons both do I find really interesting is they turn FaceTime on, and then they got friends on this call that are joining and leaving, but then they just go about their day.

1:38:40 They’re playing a game, but not necessarily with each other, but maybe they are with each other, so it’s a highly social interaction at the same time. But you’re right, these immersive worlds where you can decide what happens are so compelling compared to linear media. I can’t watch anything unless it’s a classic. If it’s from 20 years ago, the storyline is just like, oh, here we go, and we’re going to flog this for another 20 minutes until you’ve complete this plot point.

1:39:13 As opposed, I just started watching The Bear. That’s amazing. Jesus Christ, I’m starting to call it the first punk rock TV show because it is so frenetic and dialogue over the top of each other, and so many layers of story going on that I’m watching that one with my spine. Are you in season one now or season two? I’ve just started two.

1:39:37 Oh, my gosh. Yeah, if anybody should check out The Bear. There’s two seasons. It was on FX, I think, in the States, and man, I mean, again, it’s roughly a 30-minute episode genre of eight episodes. Like, that’s been going on for a long time, and you’re thinking, what could they do new with that?

1:39:56 And you look at the show, and it just dials up your blood pressure, dials up your brain. A few of the things we were talking about earlier throws you non-sequiturs and plot gaps, and there’s multiple storylines happening while you’re seeing sensory overload, and it’s fucking brilliant. I love it, and I love the attention they put in there, and I love how it makes my brain warped. A bit like Atlanta does, but it’s like Atlanta on crystal mesh. I had a first look deal with Imagine for two years, which is Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, and Grazer’s a nutcase.

1:40:30 You just think of him with that hair straight up, and he’s always in the reservoir dog suit, and I got a chance. Grazer thought, because I was the game guy, I could just ask him anything where everybody else around him was like, oh, my God, it’s Brian Grazer, right? So I would just say, Brian, why’s your hair like that? And he would say, that’s a good question, because nobody remembers the writer. So I started doing this crazy haircut, and they remembered me after that.

1:40:59 But I asked him one time, like, Brian, why do you think you’re so successful? Like, your body of work is insane. While I was there, he produced Friday Night Lights, 24, Frost and Nixon, the Deep Throat documentary, Demons and Angels. Like, his body of work was insanely eclectic, right? And he said, oh, it’s really mostly two things.

1:41:24 I love Americana, and I love taking an audience to a place they think they know about, but they don’t really know, like Apollo 13. You’d think about NASA. When you go back and watch that movie, you’re learning all about NASA. The bear, one of the things I love is like, oh, they say herd and chef, and I’m picking up, you know, it’s Americana, and I’m in a world that I haven’t been before. A kitchen.

1:41:50 Yeah. A hardcore. A hardcore. Modern kitchen. Yeah, chef kitchen.

1:41:55 Right, but with not all of the stereotypes that have been played out in the hardcore, modern kitchen. Yeah. Yeah, it’s like nuanced enough to where, like you said, you think you know, but now you’re learning new versions. And isn’t that true? Now, if you begin thinking about media, you really love, well, I’m an American, so Americana, but whatever Americana is to you, if you’re an otaku in Japan or whatever, your version of deeply obsessing is some part of your culture.

1:42:23 But that’s what all these media, if successfully do, bring us into a world, and we’re immersed in it, and we learn a bunch of new things and meet new characters. It’s such a simple idea. Breaking Bad, I’m thinking of. Oh, yeah, all these shows. You hold into this new world, and then you become an expert in it.

1:42:40 Yeah, and now I know all about Crystal Bath, right? Exactly, exactly. Final thoughts, Mark. First of all, we’re just really excited to be a part of this with you. Thank you.

1:42:51 And I’m so glad we met you, and I’m so glad we’re investors, and then just honestly just partners for the next however long, because it’s really, really cool what you’re doing, and we love the vision. And I always tell everybody, when you’re around the passion of a great founder, it’s just unlike anything out there. It’s just really great to be around people that want to make amazing things that are going to have transformative effects on humanity. So it’s been a lot of fun so far, and I’m sure it’s going to be even more fun.

1:43:21 Final thoughts just for everyone about anything. Future of shrapnel, your next steps, or even just thoughts for people out there. I often get asked, because I’m a game developer and so many people want to be a developer, I get asked, hey, my son, my nephew, my niece, wants to be a developer. What advice do you have for them? They’re going to college.

1:43:42 Should they get a game development degree? And I tell all of them, including my son, Paul, get the widest liberal arts experience that you can have. Certainly math is important, too. It’s a language that allows you to talk to programmers and don’t leave out math. But the broadest, everything, from dance to visual arts, music, and I can give you very specific examples of why that’s so important.

1:44:13 When I first got big enough budget to have an orchestral score, hire the Seattle Symphony for two days, I was usually excited, always wanted to have an orchestral, custom orchestral score. And so I began working with our in-house composer and sound designer, and we were going to hire an outside composer. Mark, what do you want to do? You know, this is going to be so cool. What do you like?

1:44:37 I like Hans Zimmer. Yeah, everybody likes Hans Zimmer. Tell me more. I like it when it’s really good and like Hans Zimmer, you know? And as he kept trying to dig out of me when I wanted, I realized, oh, I don’t have any grammar for music.

1:44:54 I mean, I literally can’t describe music. I can describe what I like, and I can name things that I listen to, but I can’t describe music. So I went off and found out why all these Italian words exist, right? And then I was able to, you know, say, you know, forte or going along lightly or whatever. And then suddenly I had a breakthrough.

1:45:18 Like, oh, everybody in my studio has a very particular grammar. A 3D artist shows me, hey, what do you think of this dumpster that I made? I’ve been trying to make the coolest dumpster ever as a prop in the game. And most of the time, the feedback they get is like, oh, no, no, it looks pretty good to me. Maybe you could make it, like, I don’t know, better.

1:45:39 Instead, I realize, well, you know, first of all, your color components don’t match the other things in the alley, and your specularies turn way too high. This bump map, bring it down too. And then I think you nailed it. So talking with precision to the various disciplines on the team turns out to be critical, which takes me back to a broad liberal arts education. And you would be very surprised where all these ideas come from.

1:46:11 Just the other day, I was quoting facilities to somebody in, you know, game design for shrapnel. How the fuck are those two things connected? I don’t know, but they are in my head, right? So don’t get a game development degree. Get a wide degree and teach yourself the language of all the disciplines of game development.

1:46:33 Would you take that further and then go, say, go live a life? Yeah, exactly. Do your dreams. Like, you’re the director of this movie. You call it your life.

1:46:45 What are you going to do with your one precious life? Are you going to sit there and talk about something you’re never going to do? Are you going to be like Michael Mann and just do it like you do and start figuring out how to make documentaries just by doing it? Yeah, I think it was Robert Greene on the show who wrote The 48 Laws of Power. And they’re like, how do I become a writer?

1:47:08 And he’s like, you’ve got to go live your life. That’s what you’ve got to do. It’s like the time I went to France and I had no money and I had to work as a bellman in a hotel. The time I did this, the time I had to work on the railroad. I had Chuck Palaniak in here on the show a couple times and it’s like he lived all these wild and crazy things and that all incorporates into the writing that he does today.

1:47:30 And it feels like you’re very similar. All of these things that you pursued with passion now allows you to create these incredible things. And I think that’s great advice to anybody out there. Just get out and live that life and it’ll help you probably pursue what you really want to do. Thank you for saying that.

1:47:48 I feel the same way about what I’ve learned about you today too. For people that want to check out Shrapnel, what’s the best way? Website and then how can they follow you? Twitter and all these other pieces. Shrapnel.com is the very best place to go.

1:48:01 I’m weak on social because I have too many other things to do. But play Shrapnel on Twitter and Discord and you’ll get into the community. I really encourage you to now because the game is coming out in December and you’ll be part of the original crew. Right and so they can get involved early to try to be part of the crew that evaluates the game and they can try to work their way in there. By the way, just buy an expansion pack.

1:48:27 Buy an expansion pack. And you become an OG and we’re glad to have your input. This is what we’ve been working for is to have the community tell us and not us tell them. I was telling you, my Twitter feed rolls by and it plays Shrapnel. It does every now and then.

1:48:45 Every time I catch it, I can’t stop looking at it. It’s so compelling. It’s so incredible. And I don’t play first person shooter games. And I’m just like, what the hell is going on there?

1:48:54 It’s just so interesting and compelling and I can see what they’re doing and I’m just, it’s like, and it’s having that effect on me. I mean, the community and all these people must be like really buzzing about it. Thanks for saying that because our art director Jay has a very, very driven goal to build a world that has a story in it and a lot of these multiplayer worlds, they’re just kind of arcadey. They don’t want to put too much visuals to confuse you because you’re just all about trying to nail the other guy.

1:49:27 And we’re both fans of Half-Life 2. There was just a world that you were in when you went into that game and he’s doing the same thing and I think that’s what you’re responding to. It looks like a lived-in world. And people know you in this industry. We know quite a few gaming people out there from the animoca folks to a bunch of other people.

1:49:49 And when you mention Shrapnel, they know what you’re doing and they’re impressed. So congratulations on the game being almost ready for full launch. Congratulations on the token launch. And man, looking forward to being a part of this and just seeing where this goes is going to be fantastic. Thank you for having me, Brian.

1:50:07 I really enjoyed it. My pleasure, man. It’s great to get to know you, see your vision, and let’s do this again soon. Thank you. Thanks, Brian.