WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.860 So I think being able to kind of step in the shoes of a character and move around a world where people aren't looking you, you know, and in a way, whether it's a good way or a bad way, I think that was probably really appealing to me. 00:00:15.040 --> 00:00:18.760 Hello, and welcome to Y-Button, the podcast that asks why we care about video games. 00:00:19.300 --> 00:00:20.380 I'm your host, Kyle Starr. 00:00:21.580 --> 00:00:30.380 On this show, I interview creators, enthusiasts, journalists and media personalities about their origins with video games, what keeps them so interested in the medium, and what excites them about the future. 00:00:31.060 --> 00:00:34.240 On this episode, I'm joined by Polygon's editor-in-chief, Chris Plante. 00:00:34.700 --> 00:00:37.900 I've been a huge fan of Chris' work since he co-founded Polygon in 2012. 00:00:38.140 --> 00:00:45.520 I'm also a huge fan of his work on The Besties podcast, a video game show with McElroy brothers, Justin and Griffin, as well as fellow Polygon co-founder Russ Frustick. 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:48.860 Full transparency, I was a bit under the weather when I spoke with Chris. 00:00:48.880 --> 00:00:51.720 This is also my first episode back since taking a little break for work. 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:09.800 Needless to say, I felt pretty rusty and not entirely on the top of my game, but thankfully, Chris has a wealth of podcasting experience and deep knowledge of various entertainment mediums, which is kind of necessary when you run a website like Polygon covering not only video games, but film, TV, books, comics, and the culture surrounding all of it. 00:01:10.520 --> 00:01:12.900 All right, enough preamble, on with the show. 00:01:15.940 --> 00:01:17.440 Chris Plante, welcome to Y-Button. 00:01:17.540 --> 00:01:18.420 Thank you for joining me. 00:01:18.480 --> 00:01:20.280 Thank you for having me, it's a delight. 00:01:20.280 --> 00:01:23.260 We've known each other for a deceptively long time. 00:01:23.440 --> 00:01:25.760 It's been at least 11 years, I think. 00:01:25.920 --> 00:01:26.820 Yeah, definitely. 00:01:26.820 --> 00:01:29.900 I bet it's like when Besties started, I met you. 00:01:30.180 --> 00:01:35.400 You were one of the first people who was like, oh, you exist, and you were like, wait, people listen to this? 00:01:36.020 --> 00:01:37.140 What the hell? 00:01:37.240 --> 00:01:38.940 Like, what is wrong with people? 00:01:39.180 --> 00:01:41.120 We thought we were just gonna put it out into the air. 00:01:41.140 --> 00:01:43.280 This is more of a vanity project. 00:01:43.460 --> 00:01:48.440 I worked in podcasts, I won't be specific about it, but I worked in podcasts about 10, 11 years ago. 00:01:48.700 --> 00:01:52.580 Before that, I was an avid fan of Polygon, and I really got to know a lot of the writers. 00:01:52.880 --> 00:01:58.620 My wife and I had moved, we moved from Orange County up to San Francisco around that time 10 or so years ago. 00:01:58.780 --> 00:02:00.560 I found myself in this kind of lonely place. 00:02:00.580 --> 00:02:01.580 I didn't really know anybody. 00:02:01.920 --> 00:02:04.960 And I started listening to more podcasts and found Besties. 00:02:04.980 --> 00:02:06.360 And I was like, this is amazing. 00:02:06.380 --> 00:02:07.620 And it's all the guys that I like. 00:02:07.900 --> 00:02:11.620 And really, because of you all, so I should just start and say, thank you so much. 00:02:11.640 --> 00:02:18.680 Because of Besties, I felt like I had a community and I felt like I had this group that I could connect with, even though it was a one-way conversation, and really got to know your work through that. 00:02:18.700 --> 00:02:21.600 And then I think, again, we started following each other on Twitter or something like that. 00:02:21.640 --> 00:02:24.600 And we ended up meeting up, I think you and I met up at the... 00:02:25.120 --> 00:02:26.400 Couple of E3s, I think. 00:02:26.560 --> 00:02:27.320 It was one E3. 00:02:27.340 --> 00:02:31.040 It was the late E3, bless his heart, RIP. 00:02:31.100 --> 00:02:33.940 But yeah, we met at E3 and just had a coffee and a chat. 00:02:33.960 --> 00:02:36.080 And I appreciate that and just thank you. 00:02:36.100 --> 00:02:41.040 So you have been really what it comes down to is you've been a voice literally in my ears for about 11 years. 00:02:41.220 --> 00:02:42.860 We've been chatting on and off here and there. 00:02:43.040 --> 00:02:44.460 I really value your opinion. 00:02:44.840 --> 00:02:50.400 I admire the work you have done over the course of your games journalism career, I guess. 00:02:50.420 --> 00:02:51.660 And we can talk more about that. 00:02:51.680 --> 00:02:54.120 But with all that said, quick question. 00:02:54.320 --> 00:02:56.360 Your last name is a noun and mine is two. 00:02:56.440 --> 00:03:02.940 Does anybody ever ask you or tell you your name is so cute or they have a fun little like anecdote about a plant? 00:03:03.320 --> 00:03:09.220 Not only, I love that this is where you start because I'm recording this audio on my end. 00:03:09.240 --> 00:03:11.600 Just be careful, real podcaster habit. 00:03:12.020 --> 00:03:17.480 And I named the file Star Plante because I was like, oh, you gotta make it something cute. 00:03:17.980 --> 00:03:24.740 If we're gonna be here together, you're gonna make something just so adorable, even if it's a stupid file name. 00:03:24.980 --> 00:03:36.220 I have an aunt whose maiden name was Human, and I'm forever crushed that they did not keep both names for their child, so they could have Ian Human Plante. 00:03:37.540 --> 00:03:40.420 But they decided that was quote, too far. 00:03:40.440 --> 00:03:44.400 So she just became Aunt Plante, is what you're talking about. 00:03:44.440 --> 00:03:46.300 Exactly, she just became Aunt Plante, thank you. 00:03:46.320 --> 00:03:51.540 Yeah, so Chris Plante, I alluded to this. 00:03:51.940 --> 00:03:54.640 You've been in the games journalism for a long time. 00:03:54.660 --> 00:03:59.880 The premise of this show Y-Button is to really figure out why people care about video games. 00:04:00.240 --> 00:04:14.380 I am a person who just surrounds himself with video game, industry news, cultural goings on, and I play the occasional game here and there, but I don't get a whole lot of time to actually play and end up immersing myself in everything else around it. 00:04:14.440 --> 00:04:15.360 But I can't get enough of it. 00:04:15.360 --> 00:04:17.040 Like, it's all the podcasts I consume. 00:04:17.060 --> 00:04:18.240 It's all the news I consume. 00:04:18.260 --> 00:04:26.300 And I gather there are more people out there that are like me that do this as well, that are just enamored with this medium, but don't really know why they're so consumed with it. 00:04:26.340 --> 00:04:30.620 Maybe this is true of other hobbies, but I'm specifically focusing on games because that's my deal. 00:04:30.680 --> 00:04:41.580 You, being in games journalism for so long, I thought might have a very interesting opinion on what your own journey in games looks like and why you're so connected to it and care about it so much. 00:04:41.880 --> 00:04:51.440 If you don't mind, I could run down the list, but I would love to hear your story about getting into games journalism, why you even started in games journalism and where it's taken you. 00:04:51.460 --> 00:05:00.340 And for the record, I should also just say, right now you are currently the editor-in-chief of polygon.com, the best video game website out there. 00:05:00.760 --> 00:05:00.980 Right? 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:01.400 Thank you. 00:05:01.440 --> 00:05:02.280 I appreciate that. 00:05:02.440 --> 00:05:08.760 I am a little surprised to be here because my origin story is so short and you're good at research. 00:05:08.760 --> 00:05:19.680 You know that if you just go to Kotaku in action and you look at the Wiki, you will find out that I had never played a video game in my life until co-founding Polygon and the entire attempt to destroy the video game industry. 00:05:19.700 --> 00:05:21.080 That's, I mean, that's really it. 00:05:21.100 --> 00:05:22.820 I've actually never played a video game. 00:05:22.880 --> 00:05:23.340 No, no. 00:05:23.760 --> 00:05:35.900 I do have a more detailed industry, but I like to imagine that it's much, because if anybody sees me, that I think if you look at me, they're like, oh yeah, what else were you gonna do with your life? 00:05:36.220 --> 00:05:40.720 Like, you kinda got filed into a hole. 00:05:40.740 --> 00:05:45.400 You weren't even trying, and it just, you sifted through. 00:05:45.420 --> 00:05:47.300 Yeah, what is my journey? 00:05:47.560 --> 00:05:52.620 Maybe the better question to start with is you obviously work in games journalism. 00:05:52.980 --> 00:05:56.180 You are, okay, again, currently the editor-in-chief of Polygon. 00:05:56.340 --> 00:05:58.960 You've spent some time at The Verge, I think, in between some Polygon stints. 00:05:58.980 --> 00:06:01.160 You actually co-founded Polygon, which was a big deal. 00:06:01.320 --> 00:06:07.180 Again, when I saw Polygon for the first time, my mind blew up, it was crazy. 00:06:07.540 --> 00:06:08.760 You've done instructing at NYU. 00:06:09.240 --> 00:06:14.760 Before Polygon, I understand that you were at UGO and helped with OneUp, oneup.com, all that. 00:06:15.400 --> 00:06:18.380 And so again, you're living in the games journalism world. 00:06:18.460 --> 00:06:22.980 Maybe the question is, why did you pick games journalism and why not make games? 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:26.820 There's obviously, you're obviously interested in games, so you go this direction of journalism. 00:06:26.840 --> 00:06:29.740 Why is it journalism and not like making games? 00:06:29.760 --> 00:06:37.600 I have the most insufferable answer for that, especially because getting a job in games journalism is really, really tough these days. 00:06:37.880 --> 00:06:41.880 But like the just being fully honest, I had no intention of doing this. 00:06:42.280 --> 00:06:46.600 I honestly didn't have a lot of interest in doing this. 00:06:46.620 --> 00:06:51.300 I guess my origin story is I loved video games as a kid. 00:06:51.420 --> 00:06:55.940 I loved playing them, but I wanted to be a writer and I didn't know what that meant. 00:06:55.980 --> 00:07:00.700 I grew up in kind of like rural area outside of Kansas City, Missouri. 00:07:00.960 --> 00:07:05.600 And I didn't even know like what you could possibly get paid for to be a writer. 00:07:05.860 --> 00:07:09.120 I don't know, I guess you could grow up and be Mark Twain. 00:07:09.180 --> 00:07:13.040 Like it was a very hard thing for me to conceptualize. 00:07:13.400 --> 00:07:23.480 But as I got into junior high and then high school, I found that I wasn't even like good necessarily at writing, but I just like, I really enjoyed it. 00:07:23.740 --> 00:07:25.160 I really enjoyed theater. 00:07:25.240 --> 00:07:26.780 I enjoyed being a performer. 00:07:26.840 --> 00:07:28.060 I enjoyed the arts. 00:07:28.380 --> 00:07:38.900 I was the kid who like, we've talked about this off the show, who found himself like very deep in the Midwest emo scene in the late 1990s, early 2000s. 00:07:39.300 --> 00:07:44.440 And I think all of that kind of opened this door of like, yeah, you can go do something. 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:46.540 Like who knows what it is, but you can go figure it out. 00:07:46.600 --> 00:07:55.780 So I applied to a whole bunch of different schools for college that were like nowhere near where I lived and ended up getting into NYU and went there for writing. 00:07:56.120 --> 00:08:00.920 They have a program that is like focused on television and film and playwriting. 00:08:02.340 --> 00:08:03.940 So I did that for college. 00:08:04.220 --> 00:08:08.860 While I was doing that, I still never fully understood like where that would take me. 00:08:08.880 --> 00:08:10.240 I just knew I had to make money. 00:08:10.260 --> 00:08:20.600 I have a hairdresser for a mother and a firefighter for a father, which I think is a great hell of a way to grow up, but it's not necessarily the most financially, you're not drowning in cash. 00:08:21.500 --> 00:08:24.100 So I knew that I needed to find some money. 00:08:24.120 --> 00:08:27.420 So even during college, I was taking gigs here and there. 00:08:27.900 --> 00:08:39.960 I interned at The Onion and then kind of fell my way into a art director gig on The Onion News Network, which was this video series that they were doing for a long time. 00:08:40.300 --> 00:08:46.320 I did a thing at the BBC in London that was hopefully going to set me up for a job. 00:08:46.340 --> 00:08:50.340 And that kind of went sideways, but it gave me a kind of a real taste for journalism. 00:08:50.980 --> 00:08:55.420 I did some work on TV pilots and then I graduated. 00:08:56.280 --> 00:09:00.680 And I graduated in 2008 into the recession and it was horrible. 00:09:00.760 --> 00:09:03.500 And even just getting like TV stuff was hard. 00:09:03.840 --> 00:09:09.140 I got a crappy job on a TV show, like a PA or writer's assistant or something. 00:09:09.200 --> 00:09:11.480 And that show got canceled after like four episodes. 00:09:11.500 --> 00:09:15.880 And I was like, I just need to find something steady so I can stay here right now. 00:09:15.920 --> 00:09:17.660 So my friends are like moving to LA. 00:09:17.680 --> 00:09:20.320 I was like, man, I can't think about moving to LA. 00:09:20.340 --> 00:09:22.300 I can barely think about staying here. 00:09:23.760 --> 00:09:26.880 So I was like, well, what am I competent at? 00:09:26.900 --> 00:09:28.860 I was like, well, I played a lot of video games. 00:09:28.880 --> 00:09:31.140 I know how to write, kind of. 00:09:31.620 --> 00:09:38.720 And I found a job listing for the lowest of the low and of entry jobs at UGO. 00:09:38.760 --> 00:09:41.060 It was kind of like an IGN competitor. 00:09:41.520 --> 00:09:52.780 A long time before I started there, by the time I got there, it was, you know, like, I don't know, it was just publishing because I guess it had enough accrued ad deals that somehow it could justify its existence. 00:09:53.260 --> 00:09:55.860 And yeah, I went into the interview. 00:09:55.880 --> 00:09:58.760 They asked me how to correctly spell Matthew McConaughey. 00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:00.140 I got it wrong. 00:10:00.720 --> 00:10:07.560 And then I told them that's a really stupid question from a bunch of people who couldn't get 50 other typos that I had found on the home page that day. 00:10:07.760 --> 00:10:13.500 And the person who hired me, fortunately was the type of person who liked that talk and was like, the gall of ya. 00:10:13.520 --> 00:10:15.720 I would never talk that way now. 00:10:15.740 --> 00:10:23.760 I mean, what a, talk about just total bullshit that I pulled off and yeah, I got a job in for the first year. 00:10:23.900 --> 00:10:28.060 Honestly, I mostly, I uploaded XML sheets. 00:10:28.740 --> 00:10:32.540 We didn't, people when you publish now, you think of it like Twitter, right? 00:10:34.960 --> 00:10:53.840 You press post and ours was you wrote the actual code into sheets and then you uploaded those files and then you waited for a half hour for all of them to hit the server, holding your breath because if there was an error, it killed the site and then you had to be there to go through it all again. 00:10:53.860 --> 00:11:03.000 I mean, it was, it's funny because it's so similar, not similar, but it is an echo of the early print days where you actually had to publish. 00:11:03.280 --> 00:11:10.500 So yeah, I guess that's my like walking uphill, but I did that mostly to pay my bills and paid awful. 00:11:10.660 --> 00:11:13.820 Paid, I mean, truly horrendous. 00:11:13.840 --> 00:11:20.760 Was barely, it wasn't enough honestly to like get by, you know, it was like, you know, you eat ramen and beans for a year. 00:11:20.780 --> 00:11:23.620 And then I just kind of kept climbing. 00:11:23.660 --> 00:11:34.720 I don't know, it was, it was so, I had so little money in so little time that it's what they tell you in art school, is like don't have a plan B because your plan B will become your life. 00:11:34.880 --> 00:11:43.920 I just got very, very, very lucky in that while that beginning part was like really hard, it ended up blossoming into this thing that I've like loved. 00:11:44.220 --> 00:11:53.720 And I'm so glad that like I took a job at a place I kind of hated, doing a thing I kind of hated and just kind of like wasn't thinking about it during that period. 00:11:53.740 --> 00:11:55.240 I was just thinking about getting through the years. 00:11:55.320 --> 00:11:58.160 And by the time I kind of worked my way up, I was there. 00:11:58.180 --> 00:12:02.820 Well, I was writing things that I actually cared about and had a little bit of an audience. 00:12:02.840 --> 00:12:07.580 So sorry, that was a long, long walk for a small glass of me, but. 00:12:07.860 --> 00:12:10.160 No, I think it's very insightful. 00:12:11.020 --> 00:12:14.480 And I'm then curious, how then does Polygon happen? 00:12:14.500 --> 00:12:19.340 So you're still at this, you're still at UGO and then you move into it just one day. 00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:21.940 Hey, we're gonna set up a new website with some friends. 00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:22.900 What's the deal there? 00:12:23.380 --> 00:12:25.960 Yeah, I wish it was that. 00:12:27.320 --> 00:12:36.040 So when I was in college and again, I was kind of experimenting with journalism and just how can I write in a way that entertains myself? 00:12:36.140 --> 00:12:46.540 I had written a few kind of opiniony things for a site called GameSet Watch, which was run by the absolutely fantastic Simon Carless. 00:12:46.840 --> 00:12:51.480 There is a generation of people in this industry that owe their careers to this man. 00:12:51.900 --> 00:12:55.380 He helped to run GDC, I would say, during its prime. 00:12:55.460 --> 00:12:58.620 By helped, I mean like, was like a key part. 00:12:59.340 --> 00:13:06.900 He ran a poorly named, but extremely important at the time, Gamma Sutra and GameDev, just so influential. 00:13:06.980 --> 00:13:14.720 Now he runs a great, great consultancy kind of group slash newsletter slash tool called GameDiscoverCo. 00:13:14.920 --> 00:13:15.920 It's a great newsletter. 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:16.580 I love it. 00:13:16.600 --> 00:13:18.100 Shout out, it's so insightful. 00:13:18.200 --> 00:13:26.760 But yeah, while he was in college, he was like, hey, I'll pay you a little bit of money and you can write something once a week and you can get some experience. 00:13:26.780 --> 00:13:32.520 And another writer named Lee Alexander was there at the time and she kind of took me under her wing. 00:13:32.720 --> 00:13:36.760 And because of that, I knew what I thought good work looked like. 00:13:37.140 --> 00:13:45.640 I had a taste of what my mind at the time was like good critical thinking and reporting. 00:13:46.080 --> 00:13:47.780 And I craved it. 00:13:47.840 --> 00:13:52.820 So even when I wasn't doing it, I had this kind of like, I really want to do that. 00:13:52.980 --> 00:13:54.600 Like how do I get people to pay me to do that? 00:13:54.860 --> 00:13:56.980 I'm probably not going to go back into TV production. 00:13:57.000 --> 00:13:59.000 That's a bust for now, maybe one day. 00:13:59.080 --> 00:14:03.920 But I'm starting to enjoy this and I would enjoy it even more if I could write something that I believed in. 00:14:05.020 --> 00:14:07.280 You know, not just like captions and galleries. 00:14:07.580 --> 00:14:14.260 So at UGO, after about probably like a year and a half, two years, it had been acquired by Hearst. 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:17.180 We had then acquired OneUp and EGM. 00:14:17.580 --> 00:14:19.620 It was just kind of all over the place. 00:14:19.980 --> 00:14:22.180 I, the writing was kind of on the wall. 00:14:22.200 --> 00:14:35.940 You know, the recession had just kind of lingered and my boss had like suggested, you know, I don't know if layoffs are going to happen, but if they do, I think it'd be great if you like stayed still and you could like help, but there would just be like fewer people here. 00:14:36.240 --> 00:14:45.380 And one of the like most not me things I've ever done, I'm so forever grateful to this very brief, wise version of myself, was I said like, please don't. 00:14:45.520 --> 00:14:48.540 I was like, please, please lay me off. 00:14:49.160 --> 00:14:54.400 Because if I get laid off, we had been acquired by Hearst, I'll get a good exit package for a few months. 00:14:54.580 --> 00:15:03.500 And I, and since really my entire adult life, since the day I moved to NYU, I hadn't had two or three months just try to figure something out. 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:06.400 I'd always been chasing some money. 00:15:06.600 --> 00:15:08.360 So I was like, this is it. 00:15:08.380 --> 00:15:10.300 I need that chance. 00:15:10.760 --> 00:15:14.920 And then if that chance doesn't work out and I need to move back home or something, so be it. 00:15:14.920 --> 00:15:16.460 But at least I'll have gotten the chance. 00:15:16.800 --> 00:15:21.960 So yeah, so they ended up laying me off basically on my birthday. 00:15:23.300 --> 00:15:24.340 It was nice. 00:15:24.520 --> 00:15:26.560 It was a perfect present. 00:15:26.560 --> 00:15:27.840 I felt very lucky. 00:15:27.860 --> 00:15:28.540 I was very young. 00:15:29.660 --> 00:15:33.060 I felt very spoiled because I was young. 00:15:33.080 --> 00:15:35.800 I didn't have kids or anybody relying on me at this point. 00:15:35.820 --> 00:15:38.600 So a lot of people on my team had it much worse. 00:15:38.620 --> 00:15:40.140 But for me, it was an opportunity. 00:15:40.400 --> 00:15:50.820 And I, from there, just took every dollar I could find because I knew that if I could start to become self-sufficient as a freelancer, then I could start to actually pick my battles. 00:15:51.040 --> 00:16:08.080 So I did a lot of like, there is an entire era of how to do social media templates at Scholastic, where if you want to know how to use Reddit, and you worked at Scholastic or you're an author, you read my document on how to use FARC or whatever else. 00:16:08.440 --> 00:16:10.380 It was a lot of like that sort of writing. 00:16:10.880 --> 00:16:30.280 And around the same time, a publication called The Daily, which not The Daily, The New York Times podcast, the iPad-only newspaper launched and an editor there had somehow seen some other various freelance work I picked up and was like, hey, I need somebody like right now. 00:16:30.440 --> 00:16:31.440 Can you start writing? 00:16:31.620 --> 00:16:36.200 And they needed to fill a lot of pages fast and I could do that. 00:16:36.520 --> 00:16:41.240 So I started writing kind of features there on a weekly cadence. 00:16:41.260 --> 00:16:42.840 I was just, I mean, it was just nonstop. 00:16:43.140 --> 00:16:49.560 I felt like it was just writing or it was a great like exercise and that it got me fast. 00:16:49.580 --> 00:16:53.560 It got me to like really, really produce a lot of work and really go out and do interviews. 00:16:53.580 --> 00:16:54.160 That was the other thing. 00:16:54.180 --> 00:16:57.980 It's like, I need somebody who can be in New York and go and talk to people every day. 00:16:58.260 --> 00:17:04.900 So every day I was walking in and just finding, trying to find a story in New York that was related to entertainment and putting it in their newspaper. 00:17:04.920 --> 00:17:06.640 And I don't think anybody read it. 00:17:06.960 --> 00:17:09.140 Entertainment was the beat you were after for that publication? 00:17:09.800 --> 00:17:13.920 Yeah, it was entertainment, I mean, very games focused, but like kind of games in the world. 00:17:13.940 --> 00:17:16.500 So like going to like a pinball bar, stuff like that. 00:17:16.620 --> 00:17:16.940 Right. 00:17:16.960 --> 00:17:17.380 But yeah. 00:17:17.600 --> 00:17:31.980 And then from there, I kind of was able to build up a portfolio and I knew that I eventually wanted to try to get back onto staff because while I enjoyed it, it was unrelenting in how much I had to produce just to, you know, again, pay my bills. 00:17:32.320 --> 00:17:35.980 And there were a few different options that I had. 00:17:36.580 --> 00:17:41.040 And the one that seemed the biggest gamble is the one that I ended up taking, which was Polygon. 00:17:41.320 --> 00:17:49.380 And I got, which is in hindsight is so funny because the other options, I won't go into it, but like not, they would have been the wrong choices. 00:17:49.740 --> 00:17:54.480 But at the time, so many people let me know that I was making a huge mistake. 00:17:55.960 --> 00:17:59.380 And now I, that's a great thing to get a carry with you. 00:17:59.440 --> 00:18:00.260 I will say that. 00:18:00.640 --> 00:18:04.940 That is the great thing about following your heart is when it does work out, it feels really good. 00:18:05.160 --> 00:18:05.900 I told you so. 00:18:06.120 --> 00:18:06.500 Yeah. 00:18:06.540 --> 00:18:07.480 I told you so. 00:18:07.500 --> 00:18:08.440 It's a powerful thing. 00:18:08.460 --> 00:18:14.060 So yeah, that's kind of like how I got from a bad place to a better place. 00:18:14.280 --> 00:18:14.920 That's awesome. 00:18:15.200 --> 00:18:17.000 And we haven't really even touched on it yet. 00:18:17.020 --> 00:18:18.600 I know we've been talking already a lot. 00:18:18.600 --> 00:18:24.420 And I do think your career in journalism is important for actually specifically talking about games. 00:18:24.440 --> 00:18:41.600 There wasn't a whole lot there about games and games journalism specifically, but I imagine throughout all of that, you were not only covering games for the daily for eventually Polygon, UGO, all this sort of stuff, but you're playing games on the side throughout this or could you, you know, maybe that's a good question is like you're focusing on paying your bills. 00:18:41.600 --> 00:18:44.920 Are you even able to play games during any of this time? 00:18:44.940 --> 00:18:46.780 Yeah, I mean, you are. 00:18:46.800 --> 00:18:55.220 But what you would play at that time was like the worst you were you were truly picking through the sludge pile. 00:18:55.620 --> 00:19:10.100 It's kind of hard to imagine now because I think one, there's just so many games out and there's so many good games out that you could every week publish a couple reviews and you would never have to really review anything that's below like a six out of ten. 00:19:10.160 --> 00:19:10.440 Right. 00:19:10.460 --> 00:19:14.520 If you're using the score system, people always say like, you know, why is IGN not have lower scores? 00:19:14.560 --> 00:19:15.860 There's any reasons for that. 00:19:15.860 --> 00:19:23.400 But modern day, like just because everything's like pretty solid and there's a ton of it, you know, you don't have time for the sludge. 00:19:23.580 --> 00:19:35.580 But when I was getting started, you know, you had really big good games come out in November, and that was kind of the thing, you know, maybe you got a few throughout the year before that. 00:19:35.620 --> 00:19:37.920 If you were lucky, there were some surprises. 00:19:38.140 --> 00:19:56.060 But like week to week, you're reviewing, you know, like Jerry Rice's dog football on the Wii or like, you know, some I reviewed a zombie car racing game that Activision put out for joystick that I swear was totally incomplete. 00:19:56.080 --> 00:20:12.420 But my favorite thing about it was when you hit the pause of any, it just started playing like really delicate acoustic guitar and I was like, sure, like this is so clearly somebody got away with one, you know, like this game was so unchecked that somebody's like, yeah, whatever. 00:20:12.440 --> 00:20:18.080 Like I'm going to put my cool, my extremely cool guitar music in this otherwise completely forgettable game. 00:20:18.900 --> 00:20:21.360