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Episode 60 - R.I.P. AdventureGamers
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We have a bit of a different episode for you today. This is the story of Adventure Gamers: A decades-old website dedicated to Adventure Games and their fans that was recently bought out by a mysterious compaany and hollowed out for the promotion of online gambling and cryptocurrency.
Matt and Roses chat with John Walker, Timothy Malmros, Jack Allin, and Emily Morganti to help to provide insights into what Adventure Gamers meant to them, what the hell happened to it, why it happened, and what the future is for Adventure Game fans looking for a home.
Email us: mattandroses@gmail.com
You can read John Walker’s article here: https://kotaku.com/adventure-gamers-forums-gambling-ads-jack-allin-1851784764
You can read Timothy Malmros’s coverage of Click Out Media here: https://recleudo.com/under-googles-blind-eye-a-growing-parasite-ecosystem-is-flourishing/
In case you haven’t heard of it, Jack Allin’s new website: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/
Game Boomers: https://www.gameboomers.com/
The infamous Old Man Murray article: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Emily Morganti’s website: http://emilymorganti.com/
And here is some other coverage we used to prepare for this episode:
https://aftermath.site/adventure-gamers-online-casino-gambling-website-sale-parasite-seo
Games Mentioned:
- Beekeeper’s Picnic
- Baldur’s Gate II
- Dune Awakening
- Sins of a Solar Empire II
- Frostpunk
- Ixion
- Keeper
- Shadow of Destiny
- Peasants Quest
- Universal Paperclips
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Format Change
00:00:19
Speaker
hey everyone, welcome back to Save Your Game. I am your host, or one of your hosts, Pushing Up Roses. With me, my amazing co-host, the greatest jumper in the world, expert Blueprints player, Matt Aukamp. Hey Matt.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hey, i'm I'm recording from the top of my roof right now because I jumped so high.
00:00:43
Speaker
And I assume you're also playing Blueprints up there on your Steam Deck while recording. i drew i drew ah i drew my own blueprints up here.
00:00:54
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's a real big time sink. I have to draw and erase really, really fast. Are you using like a whiteboard or like a pencil? Because that's just going to rip up your paper. Like you got to not do that. oh No, I'm drawing on the roof tiles.
00:01:09
Speaker
Oh, geez. Okay. Okay.
00:01:13
Speaker
And then I'm using um ah magic one of those magic erasers. Oh, yeah. Those things are pretty good. I don't know how they work on roofs, ah but yeah, you'll have to report back on your hand-drawn blueprints thing.
00:01:28
Speaker
I've gone through 72 magic erasers. Oh, my God. And i' ah I'm only three rooms in blueprints. Is this why you needed money? Can you please send me more? Can you please send me more?
00:01:44
Speaker
blow the budget on Magic Erasers? Please, I need it. Hey, what do we... Wait, we didn't even do a cold open. What's going on?
AdventureGamers.com Buyout and Changes
00:01:55
Speaker
I know, i know. And that is because this is going to be a little bit different than our other episodes. We are going to be discussing the buyout of ah legendary ah legendary website, AdventureGamers.com.
00:02:11
Speaker
You probably ah already know about this. And if you don't, you're about to. i don't know how much we want to go into this in this intro and how much we want to let our guests talk about it, but... I discovered first through Blue Sky AdventureGamers.com is a classic site for news and reviews of adventure games.
00:02:28
Speaker
It's been around since... 1998. I think the article that was that broke this story said 27 years. Yes. This site was up. Yeah. ah This site's been around for a very long time. It's a really trusted name in news and reviews for adventure games.
00:02:42
Speaker
And it had that those adventure game awards, the Aggies. Did you ever follow those? No, I didn't. Yeah, every year. Did I win? did i Did I win?
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah. I did? I'm like the best adventure retro adventure. I'm the best game. You're the best adventure game.
00:03:04
Speaker
Listen, I think I deserve something. Anyway. from So and and people might have noticed like the Aggies stopped about two years ago and their reviews slowed down um to a trickle. And so i I read on Blue Sky that some changes happened to the site. First of all, it.
00:03:25
Speaker
started promoting all kinds of online gambling yeah and online casinos. yeah Second of all, it seemed to be full of a bunch of new AI articles, AI written articles. And and we we cannot prove that, but we can speculate.
00:03:39
Speaker
And if your articles are sounding like AI, that's just not great anyway. Right, right. Third thing, the forums. Forms that have been around for 25 years and much people made friends and business connections and put large chunks of their internet social lives into were just fucking gone.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah. And then lastly, all the bylines and all their reviews and articles, including reviews that I wrote for them ah for a few years, um the bylines disappeared and they all just were credited to AG staff. So- We wanted to figure out what the hell happened. There were some news articles about this. um Luke Plunkett did an article for Aftermath that was really good. And then and there was a very comprehensive one at Kotaku called Beloved 27-Year-Old Gaming Site Wipes Forums Relaunches as a Gambling Affiliate Cash Grab ah by John
Interview with John Walker
00:04:39
Speaker
Walker. And so we wanted to have John on the show and talk to him about
00:04:43
Speaker
you know, what happened, how he came across this story. Yeah. And we had a great conversation with John. We did. I really liked John. i didn't know how into adventure games he is.
00:04:54
Speaker
Oh, yes. for Super, super. And Chicago fan. o and Adventure game lover and Chicago fan. The best people in the world.
00:05:05
Speaker
So, Roses, why don't we just play our interview with John and then we'll come back and we'll talk about it a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Should we should we throw up some music here, Troll? Why don't you throw up Gambly Casarino?
00:05:19
Speaker
Wow. did you You made that up, yes? Yeah. Okay. I'm just like, how? Wow. I'm so unused to making it up too that like we probably cut out the the pause, but like I'm so unused to making them up myself that that took me like a full 30 seconds.
00:05:36
Speaker
and You're so privileged now with your like generator that you have. know. I got to exercise this brain more.
00:05:55
Speaker
Joining us to help um explain a little bit more of the context of this Adventure Gamers fiasco is freelance editor Kotaku, who ah broke this story for Kotaku. It's John Walker.
00:06:09
Speaker
John, thanks for being here. Hi, thanks for having me. You've been writing about video games for a while. yeah How did you start with that? So I started 26 years ago, a very long time ago. as just I got a couple of things published in a film magazine and I emailed PC Gamer in the UK and and asked for some work and they gave me a trial and um yeah, and they liked it. And then, yeah, I was on PC Gamer for 10 years.
00:06:36
Speaker
And then i co-launched Rock Paper Shotgun. You did? I did. great site. Thank you. That's awesome. um Nothing to do with me for like ah eight years, but so I can't take any credit for recent stuff. But um yeah, no, me and a bunch of guys from PC Gamer and Future Publishing, we we wanted to be free of them.
00:06:54
Speaker
And so, yeah, we started RPS. And then since then, I've been hanging around with Kotaku. You also, you do have some adventure game bona fides.
00:07:05
Speaker
I was the adventure games reviewer for PC Gamer for 10 years. And it was just during a very dark patch for the genre. um Oh my gosh, yeah. All of the Creo and Microids games and giving them very low scores in PC Gamer.
00:07:22
Speaker
What span of years was that then? like I would say the first 10 years of the new new millennium. Oh no. Yeah. That's like the worst. That's the worst years for adventure games. yeah And you just, cause you're 99, you just had longest journey. So, you know, it was at a peak and then it went off that cliff. Can we just mention a monkey Island four from 2000? Anybody?
00:07:40
Speaker
and Matt? I went to LucasArts to review that in San Francisco and I still maintain that it was a lot better than everyone else says because it was by Mike Stemley and Sean Clark who did Simon Max Hit the Road.
00:07:55
Speaker
See, I am on your side. like that name and Matt is a jerk. You...
00:08:02
Speaker
Here's the thing. it it is a completely different tone than the other Monkey Island games like by yeah by a ah far margin and Monkey Combat's the worst thing that's ever been in any video game ever.
00:08:17
Speaker
But there's always worst thing about every game. it's it's not It's not good, but then the spitting wasn't good either, and nor was the insult combat wasn't that particularly great. It was frustrating to actually play.
00:08:29
Speaker
i like Well, you're right, but I loved it. Yeah, there you go. But also, I was i was nine, so
00:08:38
Speaker
So I grew up playing adventure games. My dad got ah ah zedex eight but eighty one in 1981. And, you know, he was he was a dentist, but he was testing um text adventure games but and for some reason.
00:08:49
Speaker
um um Never, never figured out quite how. So I was playing I was playing adventure games before they were graphics. So, you know, I've i've ah ah a lot of lifelong history with the genre. So did you work for Revolution Software? Did you work on the director's cut of Broken Sword?
00:09:04
Speaker
That is true. I did. I was. Wow. I script edited it, the new content, and I wrote the hint system and I wrote the diary entries for both characters for the whole games. So you were like.
00:09:15
Speaker
this goat puzzle has to go. Oh yeah, that was like, honestly, so was in front from the start. ah Charles had me write the, I wrote the pitch document to Ubisoft to get it um to exist. and i Holy cow.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. and So it was like, I was like, the goat puzzle's gone from the from the start. I have to know, do you have an adventure game you're most fond of? I can't
AdventureGamers.com Evolution and Community Impact
00:09:35
Speaker
pick just one, but I would say I'm split between Day of the Tentacle and the Longest Journey.
00:09:40
Speaker
The longest journey, really? Okay, cool. Changed my life. I was 21 when I played that. And what that game has to say about imagination and yeah our role as not the main character in real life is ah stunning. So as as a big Adventure Game fan, when did you first become aware of or start following Adventure Gamers, the website?
00:09:59
Speaker
I would say it would have been that PC Gamer era, those early 2000s. And specifically, I mean, I was aware it existed, but it was specifically there was a game that came out. um I can never remember what the game is called, but there was a game that came out and it was awful. And I gave it like 40 something percent in PC Gamer.
00:10:17
Speaker
And then those people on the Adventure Gamers Forum were complaining about my review. Which it turned out mostly to be the developer of the game. Oh, yeah. yeah And so I got me and another guy called Richard Cobbett, who was also a freelancer for PC Gamer.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, Richard. Yeah, Richard. He works with Wajidai now doing um his vampire game. And he and I took, we basically ran, we just invaded the forum for about three days. It was, I think it was the longest ever thread.
00:10:43
Speaker
And it went down in legend as the two of us just absolutely... just Okay, so his this is what I said i said of this post of Just Adventure and an event and Adventure Gamers. It's a heroin addicts reviewing heroin.
00:10:56
Speaker
Oh dear. That's my theory, right? These people are very, very, very addicted to visit to these this genre and they don't care as long as they can get a hit. Something's being injected in their veins so they just don't care what it is.
00:11:08
Speaker
yeah so Everything's a five out of five game when you when you don't care. And so this was this is my contention and and I caused all sorts of fuss. Well done. I think that's fair. And I think that I think I think sometimes it still goes to extremes. Like, right. You get a 10 out of 10 where a game is really from outside the genre. It's like, ah, that's a seven, maybe eight. Like it's a fine adventure game, but it's not doing much. It's not saying much outside of the classics of the genre. Yeah.
00:11:37
Speaker
Here's the other side of that coin, though. If you're adventure gamers, you're a volunteer-run site with people who passionately love these games, writing for other people who passionately love them. And so yeah while it wasn't of providing a service for for me, ah in the sense that I wanted really good quality over and above a female cop with a German accent, it's so discovering that there's psychic powers behind the latest murder, which is, I think, every game released in that decade.
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. yeah but some But it was, yeah, it was providing, it was a it was a fan site for fans. And I totally get that. And I think that was a really important thing. And also I'm using the past tense because I think it matured a great deal since then.
00:12:17
Speaker
Right. Because I think the, that what I was going to say, the other side of that also is just this idea of, If you're super into it, you know, you're going to nitpick things that other people aren't going to care as much about. Right. So you might give a game two out of ten because the puzzle is there's a puzzle that's too easy or something.
00:12:37
Speaker
So I think it goes it could go both ways. Do you remember? Oh, my gosh. I wish I could remember the name of the site. There was an old video game site. it was huge at the time and it it died away. There was a journalist on there called Bob something.
00:12:48
Speaker
And he used to review every adventure game by writing... ah ah Someone like me, who's an expert, will find this game easy. But Novicex was really strong. He wrote that in every review.
00:12:58
Speaker
Oh, good. Wow. That's... Well, you know, that's why ah reviewers need an editor. And speaking of, that was sort of the first real turn in adventure gamers, right? The early twenty twenty s When Jack Allen left the site, we reached out to Ivo, previous owner of Adventure Gamers, for this podcast.
00:13:26
Speaker
He eventually... He did respond to one email of mine, but i but we we did not manage to get him on the show. um So what did...
00:13:37
Speaker
Ivo have to say about that period? and Like it's 22, wasn't it? There was, um so i'd I'd already heard Jack's side of it. um And so I'd put some of that to Ivo as we chatted by text yeah um rather than a conversation. So it was a bit more stilted, but he he talked about, it seemed to be a real dis disagreement about how much money they had. and And what really came across from talking to Ivo was that he had been, he says that he'd been investing a large amount of his own money into the site to keep it going.
00:14:04
Speaker
And that
SEO Exploitation and Legal Issues
00:14:05
Speaker
that wasn't being appreciated by anyone else. And he'd reached a point where he was done funding the site out of his own money. Right. And so there was a Patreon that went on. There seems to be some conflict about this too. Jack was talking about how it was an ongoing income, whereas Ivo was talking about it as if it were a one-off. The way he described it, he wanted to use this this this new revenue, this new income to stop him having to pay to keep the site online.
00:14:29
Speaker
Whereas I think from the other perspective, Jack was hoping to get better compensated for his time. I don't understand, though, Patreon is not set up to be a one-off thing. No, that's they see, this conf confused me, too. Yeah, Patreon is... is I mean, their Patreon specifically had rewards for monthly members, and it did have one-time contribution options.
00:14:50
Speaker
So it is possible, I guess... that more people contributed one time than monthly, but they were getting monthly revenue from Patreon. that I wonder why they chose to, because you you can advertise your, I have a Patreon and you can advertise it in many different ways, but I would never advertise it as, you can just use this as a one-off.
00:15:13
Speaker
but Like that seems weird to advertise it like that. So Iva described it as a ah ah rare revenue windfall, which is hard to say out loud. um And which she'll cover three, she said described as covering three months of operations. And he wanted to preserve that rather than paying out of his own money, which should like sounds understandable from his perspective. Sure.
00:15:34
Speaker
That's where things started to fall apart. As you're understanding what occurred from there forward. Yeah, so as far as I can tell, um Jack was expecting a pay rise and in fact received less than he was expecting.
00:15:46
Speaker
um Ivo sees it differently. He he he says Jack, I can just quote from what he said to me, he said, Jack, understandably, given his significant contributions over the years, felt he deserved increased compensation.
00:15:56
Speaker
right And she says, while I sympathize with his position and did provide an additional payment that month, I felt we couldn't continue if there wasn't a mutual understanding of financial constraints. So it really does seem to come down to this sense that neither understood the financial situation of the other and neither seemed to realize that both you both wanted money, understandably, for doing an enormous amount of work. Right. Yeah. um And so, yeah he...
00:16:21
Speaker
it It seems that Jack stayed on and finished the month out, and then they just agreed to part ways. From Ivo's perspective, he was to he continued running the site. He said that without having to pay Jack's ah wage, he was then able to remove advertising from the site, um switch to occasional campaigns, and um did that for a few years. And then just seems like he ran out of steam.
00:16:43
Speaker
So we did look into this a little bit. And through snapshots on archive.org, it does appear as if Advertising did decrease a little bit. There was a reduction in banner ads that eventually seemed to disappear entirely by 2025. And advertising seemed relegated to spots you could buy through their Patreon to advertise a game and have a a a link to click through to wishlist on Steam.
00:17:11
Speaker
Based on the most current snapshot I could find about their Patreon... The last it was captured, um which was 2024, they had 110 members, only 71 paid members, and they were making about $550 a month.
00:17:27
Speaker
So take from that what you will, and let's get back to John. Yeah, he told me that he was um exploring options. He apparently, he he volunteered this name, which is fantastic, but he apparently ah spoke to PC Games N um as an option. that That obviously didn't happen. I think that would have been quite positive for the site if that had happened. Yeah. And then he listed it on acquire.com for a while, but it didn't seem to get any takers.
00:17:49
Speaker
Acquired.com is this, it seems to be this kind of highbrow site where you can list businesses for sale. There's no pricing. There's no, um it's not like a shop. It's, it seems to be just sort of, is there interest in purchasing out this company and you can contact and get an in touch?
00:18:04
Speaker
And he eventually said that that wasn't, he, he, he briefly listed it there to get offline to reflect further. He said, Oh, okay. Yeah. Right. So what's what's your understanding then of how
Jack Allen and Community Shifts
00:18:15
Speaker
he came to? You discovered that the site eventually was sold to ClickOut Media. Yes. I find it fascinating that they're hiding who they are. with Yeah. yeah Or not bothering to let anyone know if not hiding.
00:18:26
Speaker
Seems very strange not to just pop yourself in the copyright at the bottom of the site. Absolutely. they They removed their cop ah contact page. They are also... they've anonymized all their information on, say, on like any of the domain ownership websites.
00:18:42
Speaker
Wow. Very odd. It's very odd. It's just odd, right? Yeah. Yeah. Is that legal? Can you just not have a contact page on your website? No, i think I think you could definitely run sites anonymously and so on. Yeah, yeah. It's a very it's very odd to leave up the contact page and just and leave the words saying how to contact you, but then just remove all the links. That's just odd. Yeah.
00:19:05
Speaker
yeah It's lazy. It's lazy is what it is. But then if you look at the site, it hasn't been updated in terms of anything other than gambling ads since the beginning of June. so And like the ads seem, appear to be ah yeah AI generated as far as I can tell.
00:19:21
Speaker
ah It's sad. It's a sad time. So your what is your understanding, John, of who Ivo thought he was selling to? In my communications with him, there is a big gap here. okay Obviously, he wasn't talking about who he'd sold it to. But my impression is that he was quite surprised by how uninterested they were in the site that they bought.
00:19:41
Speaker
Right. He told me that after the sale, they they mentioned converting to WordPress and he strongly, as he said, he strongly advised against it. Right. um And then heard nothing back until it was, it had happened anyway. And obviously that had absolutely screwed up everything on the back end and all the, everyone's credits for their work was gone and um my god and things were missing. And obviously then that killed the forum as well.
00:20:01
Speaker
So just, i can quote Ivo again, just talking about the company. He says that, um, He says, communication went quiet and I continued operating until I discovered the site had been switched to the new platform with missing content, disappeared sections and gambling content.
00:20:13
Speaker
I originally learned the company was primarily SEO focused, acquiring sites much larger than ours. I had anticipated they might use it for occasional guest posts or content tied to other other properties, leveraging the site's established reputation and link authority while maintaining the original operation.
00:20:29
Speaker
Now it's become clear our expectations for the site's future were quite different. um He said, in hindsight, I should have done more thorough due diligence on their other properties and long term strategy. Right. And then just expresses regret about what's happened. How do you interpret that?
00:20:44
Speaker
Granted, as a journalist, I know you have to retain some objectivity here, but in your interpretation. i think if it were me, I sold a website. I sold Rock Paper Shotgun um and, you know, were along with my colleagues.
00:20:58
Speaker
But we and we did a lot. You know, we sold it to a company that we knew and trusted and had lots of experience and work with and It turns out that that site then sold itself to one of the most evil corporations in the world. And that's a shame.
00:21:09
Speaker
But that was afterward. So, you know, i've i've I've received the bitter end of this too. But I can imagine if I'm ah i'm burned out on this thing and it's just a time and a money sink and I just want out and these people are willing to pay.
00:21:24
Speaker
yeah i can so i can sympathize with that. Yeah. Right. i I think I can as well, but I think it would be hard, even if I were bleeding money, I think it would be hard to risk losing something I've put, what, eight years into? Ten years? Yeah, he says he said he's genuinely sad to see something he'd poured a decade of his life into transformed so dramatically. So he's yeah, I think there's a genuine sense of just sadness and regret. He put a lot of his is time and money into this thing, and it's
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. what's I'm interested in your perspective. Was the site still useful? was it Or had Hotspot entirely replaced its purpose by that point? Rose, as you would be better to answer this, because I wrote for both sites. So I have a perspective, but it might be colored by that.
00:22:11
Speaker
Sure. what I'm wondering is because I did adventure game reviews on YouTube. So I did a you know a visual and audio form of review.
00:22:22
Speaker
And in terms of usefulness, I'm going to be very, very frank. It's so rare that I do read reviews on adventure games.
00:22:34
Speaker
For the most part, I think I was more interested in audio ah visual review. Sure. Kind of get to know the reviewer a little bit more. And I'm wondering if what happened is similar to kind of what happened with Blockbuster Video. I don't know if you're familiar with Blockbuster, John, but it was- We had Blockbuster over here as well. Okay, great.
00:22:53
Speaker
You know, when that went down, people were acting like it was still in use, but it wasn't. It wasn't still in use. It was simply a big name that people loved that, you know, yeah that they were fond of. And I think maybe the same thing happened with adventure gamers.
00:23:11
Speaker
it's still beloved. It's just, I don't know truly how many people were using it. You know, i think, I think, I think, yeah, I think you're right. A relationship is essential when it comes to written yeah reviews. So I do a Patreon
Reflections on AdventureGamers.com Legacy
00:23:25
Speaker
funded website called buried treasure, where I just write about tiny games that can't get covered on major gaming sites because they're too small for the sites to to be financially viable for the sites to write. That's cute name. Buried treasure. i like that. Sorry. go on. Yeah.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah, and so I write about, i I try to cover any adventure games like ah Beekeeper's Picnic was one I did in April. What's that? Oh, how was that? Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to introduce you. It's it's a beautiful game. um It's about Sherlock Holmes postsec post First World War.
00:23:54
Speaker
What? Holmes is retired um to Sussex and Watson has just come back from the front lines in the war and is still you know is struggling. And he moves back, he moves to Sussex to live in Holmes's new home.
00:24:07
Speaker
And um it's about Sherlock Holmes trying to make a nice picnic for him. Oh my God, it looks amazing. It looks so cute. That sounds incredibly twee, but it's not. And it's actually, it's like it's a game about Holmes confronting how he's treated Watson his entire life.
00:24:22
Speaker
Wow. And you can choose how the nature of how Holmes feels about the relationship and you can take it in in obvious directions or not as you choose. i am loving these graphics. And it's beautiful. It's an absolutely beautiful game.
00:24:35
Speaker
But that's so I love, you know, and I think like, because I have a relationship with my readers and obviously patron is a direct source of that. I think, you know, and we are so on a tangent here. Yeah. but ah you can Cut all of this. I think it is relevant though. I do think it is, it is different. Cause like, I like like, like, like let's look at adventure game hotspot for a moment. I really like the community there and the workers there. I feel like I have a sense of who they are and and what the identity is. They even had an adventure game you know festival, a fanfare, where yeah they could talk to the community.
00:25:05
Speaker
And I'm wondering, what what is the current identity of adventure gamers? Like, who's... Who's behind it? I want to know. So I think before this change, the identity of Adventure Gamers lived in its forums, right? And i yeah I think that's most of the people that went to that site were the people that were still big forum members.
00:25:27
Speaker
And... I kept it, even though i was a I was a convert to Adventure Game Hotspot, I kept Adventure Gamers in like my favorites bar to see if there were bits of news or other perspectives on games.
00:25:42
Speaker
Not that I don't like all the reviews on Adventure Game Hotspot, but say that were to happen. Uh-huh. but ah huh To see an alternate perspective, but also to see if there was news that they picked up that Hotspot didn't.
00:25:55
Speaker
I don't see that value anymore. Right. Were you still a reader at all at this point, John? No, I have to say I wasn't. yeah Again, it was quite helpful for me in that in terms of this conversation is that I'm very detached from this. So I didn't, i you know, I...
00:26:10
Speaker
i um As to say, no dog in the fight. yeah um But I love ah found it incredibly sad because I know what value um that site's had and has had for so vina for decades.
00:26:22
Speaker
yeah There's one other part of the story that I wanted to address here is how did you come across this? How did this come into your orbit? So it came it was blue sky, just seeing people expressing absolute horror and I went to see and of course, you know like I say, i wasn't an ag an active reader but I...
00:26:39
Speaker
ah you known about adventure gamers for best part of 30 years. And so i was like, surely this can't be true. And then when there and just saw these extraordinary tabs, they've actually let, they've actually, there's actually fewer,
00:26:50
Speaker
get gambling tabs now, which is interesting. I've just noticed they've lowered the numbers of those along the top. Really? I have, yeah I've been, I've been trying to avoid actually going back to the site. um You are right. There is just the one.
00:27:03
Speaker
Wow. Okay. That's strange. drops down to reveal all of but it was, some yes, they were had a whole range of them. So I wonder whether they've noticed, but then there's the same type. that The first thing you see is these slot game reviews. And I don't know if they're written by AI and I will not make any claims that they are or they aren't.
00:27:19
Speaker
But boy, they sure look like they are. They do. Yep, they look like it You know how ChatGPT can't help but make a bullet-pointed list in all of its replies? I've never seen a review with multiple bullet-pointed lists before.
00:27:36
Speaker
ah now and And then when you brought the story to Kotaku, as an editor, do you you still have to get approval, I'm guessing. Yes, I have to get approval, but I have and a fantastic amount of freedom there. So i was able to just to work the story in the background for...
00:27:52
Speaker
um It took me about, it's just a week and a half, but you know, just trying to get answers and reaching out until I found ways to connect with people and then got responses back and it had enough just to put together a dialogue. I like to try to get, I love any story which is about a falling out because in my head there's like this idyllic version of the story where they're friends again by the end. ah um Clearly that wasn't going to happen here, but it's,
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, and so I was really interested. I love a two-sided story, and and so I was really interested to hear both sides and just try to communicate, because I think, I i would say i don't think the average reader of Kotaku could care less about some adventure game site having gambling ads on it. I don't think that's the story. I think the story is that this this clash of personalities and this, um just the emotional side of it.
00:28:38
Speaker
Yeah. um I think is is is fascinating. And I really i hope that there's some catharsis for both sides in so in the sense that um both were complementary about each other. And I hope those words were heard. And I think that would be really nice.
00:28:57
Speaker
Thank you. Where can people go to follow you and read your work? So I'm Botherer, B-O-T-H-E-R-E-R, pretty much everywhere. I'm active on Blue Sky. And then, um yeah, a Buried Treasure, if you want to support that, there's a Patreon, and I would hugely appreciate it.
00:29:32
Speaker
So, Roses, that was our interview with John Walker, guest editor at Kotaku, freelance journalist. how How are you feeling about the story?
00:29:43
Speaker
I'm feeling like it's a very sad story, ah first of all. But i also I also think that I think John provided a good perspective of there are um two stories here.
00:29:58
Speaker
There is the story of the person who sold the site. Mm-hmm. And it does sound, and a lot of people are kind of coming down hard on the on the previous owner, Evo.
00:30:09
Speaker
But it does really sound like they didn't really know what the circumstances were going to be. yeah um I'm glad that John said that Evo does have a lot of regrets for this. And I very much, I deeply empathize. And I think this is important.
00:30:25
Speaker
Like, obviously, don't go to the so the site. Those are the bad guys. i do deeply empathize with. be not having money to fund something and being in a tough position.
00:30:36
Speaker
And at the end of the day, we all are just trying to survive and be able to pay for art to live yeah for our lives. Like you said, Eva was losing money on the site, right? So while it's a bummer what hat like that the site died, right?
00:30:55
Speaker
It almost makes me think that I'm sure he entered it with the best of intentions, but maybe Eva wasn't. and By the way, ah couple of things. We've been calling him Evo and we call him Ivo at different points of this episode.
00:31:08
Speaker
I don't know which one it is. Yeah. We've only ever seen it written down. It's one of those. It's one of those words that you've seen only written down. And we didn't talk to anybody who's actually met the guy. So none of us have heard say it. So none of us know.
00:31:21
Speaker
But – I wonder if Evo got in over his head. Maybe he shouldn't have bought Adventure Gamers to begin with. Right? Like maybe was like granted he he was a caretaker of it for many, many years.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah. But it was losing him money and up until a point where he couldn't do it anymore. And then, you know, and then I don't necessarily know that he knew who he was selling it to. Right. i I did reach out to Evo.
00:31:52
Speaker
A couple times to see if we could get him on the show. I'll read a little bit of his email here. He said that things have been hectic at his day job. And he said he would come on the show and then didn't respond to any other emails. So i I'm assuming it's the hectic day job. Or I actually kind of don't blame him for not wanting to talk about this anymore.
00:32:14
Speaker
But he's... Yeah, I don't either. He says he's extremely frustrated by the direction the company has taken the site. And he feels fooled the original person he sold the site to didn't make it clear what, which company was behind it.
00:32:25
Speaker
He was UK. The company ended up being in Malta. Um, Until they had sold it and they had paid, he says. Yes. And we we're going to talk about more about that later, more about like intention and business and and SEO and things like that. And I think that will really bring to light how easy it is to to fall into a ah bad decision like this. You know what? I just had thought.
00:32:49
Speaker
We had done a little bit of talking about what order we were going to play those, but maybe it would be pertinent to play that one right now. Yeah, we can play that one right now. Absolutely. So one of the people we talked to was Timothy Malmros. He is a expert on the subject of Parasite ah SEO.
00:33:08
Speaker
He also he's released five parts of a six part kind of expose on Parasite. the company that bought adventure gamers so they they go by click out but they used to go by the name or they sometimes go by the name i'm a little unclear on that part of it yeah phoenixio and uh timothy's gonna talk to us a little bit about what they're all about and what the what the benefit of doing this at all could even possibly
00:33:52
Speaker
This time we've got with us an expert on something that we know very little about. ah SEO expert and journalist, Timothy Mamros. Timothy, thank you for being here.
00:34:04
Speaker
Thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited. you know Games and SEO, that's my thing, really. Yeah. so It's a perfect combination. Well, I didn't know before I started reading your breakdown of ClickOut Media and its connection to Phoenixio that this was even an SEO thing that was happening.
00:34:24
Speaker
i i to be honest, was completely unsure of why some online gambling company would want to buy, you know, this legacy adventure game fan site.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah, no ah ah i can I can break it down for you. Sure. It's honestly yeah pretty simple. I mean, it's all about links. Adventure Gamers has a lot of age, a lot of history, and it's a well-known brand, brand being keyword here because that's what they're after.
00:34:54
Speaker
Right. They want brands that have a lot of in-links from very good sites and You know, the cheaper, the better. I mean, I can't imagine if event adventure gamers made a lot of money. So the sale price would be probably cheaper.
00:35:08
Speaker
Right. Right. So it's it's just they're just printing money, basically. So what they're doing is called Parasite SEO. And Parasite SEO is where you leech off the authority of another site.
00:35:20
Speaker
So if you took the New York Times dot com and just did Slash Casino. regardless of what you write there, as long as you have the keyword casino, you would rank for casino because it's such a powerful site and has so much trust.
00:35:34
Speaker
So that's what they're trying to do with adventure gamers, basically. It has a lot of referring domains, like immense amount of trust.
00:35:45
Speaker
And this whole thing is, has nothing to do with the site. It's a niche in gaming. So they think, okay, we had They had Techopedia, which was a huge technology website.
00:35:57
Speaker
And I mean, immense trust and it ranked everywhere. And then Google found out like, oh, wait, you can't do this. And they penalized it big time. So it lost all its rankings. Then they get out of rankings and by removing the offending content, and then they added it again and cloaked it, basically hiding it for Google reviewers to see the offending content. And as soon as they did that and Google discovered it, that's site was gone again. It'll never come back.
00:36:23
Speaker
It'll take 10 years probably. Wow. So that's why they went after a niche site like Adventure Gamers because it has gamers in the name. It's about games and they think, you know, we can write about casino because it's in the same niche, but not really.
00:36:37
Speaker
Not really. Yeah. Yeah. yeah i see I see the mindset there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the reason Parasite i SEO is so effective is because, you know, an online newspaper,
00:36:49
Speaker
can get links that are gambling guy can never get. It's impossible, not naturally. You have to buy them and that costs a lot of money and most will not link to a gambling website.
00:37:00
Speaker
So I've been doing gambling SEO for 20 years until I took a break in November. So I know how hard it is to get a an accredited newspaper to link to you.
00:37:10
Speaker
So it's these links they want. now The reason why they're not doing loans or mortgages is because they wouldn't have a chance in hell to rank them. So what you do is you buy an old game site and you convert it.
00:37:22
Speaker
And it's like magic. It ranks automatically. And I can tell you a bit of background story about why this works now. Yeah, please. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. And I also want to get some background about who is ClickOut Media. But first, yeah, why? why Yeah. Oh, man, I can talk for hours. Yeah.
00:37:41
Speaker
All right. Okay. So this started, this Parasite SEO is old. This is old school SEO. You used to do this years back and it worked not as well as today, but it used to work.
00:37:53
Speaker
So when I first heard about it reemerging, i'm like, there's no way this isn't real. They haven't regressed that much, but it started, I think, I don't know exact dates, but 2019, 2020. And it happened when ChatGPT launched, because suddenly Google has a problem. It's a new innovative tech company is potentially a threat.
00:38:15
Speaker
and can take market shares. Right. so that's that's when it happened. And when that happened, localization and topical authority were removed. So when I say localization, I mean, you know you have a web shop shop in India selling wares.
00:38:29
Speaker
It has an amazing backlink profile, but you know it shouldn't rank in the US. They don't even deliver there, but yet it still happens. That's a real example. That's localization. That was turned off for some reason.
00:38:41
Speaker
And then topical authority was turned off. which means a site about bicycles cannot rank for gambling, right? It's a site about bicycles. So that was turned off. And I think this has to do with their partnership with Reddit because it's in their interest to send Reddit as much traffic as possible.
00:38:59
Speaker
So when these changes occurred, you see Reddit climbing and climbing and climbing and they got stock listed and they're climbing more because they're feeding data to their ah Google's AI, basically. That's what I think happened.
00:39:10
Speaker
I mean, it makes sense. Why else even do this? right why Why is it beneficial to them to send traffic to Reddit? ah Because they're buying all their data and their user interactions to train their AI. okay And it was the same when they had a partnership with Twitter, like years and years ago.
00:39:26
Speaker
Twitter just flew up like a rocket because it's in their interest. And at the end of the day, Google is a stock listed company. if If they make one trillion a year, they have to make one trillion, 100 million.
00:39:38
Speaker
for a mix right i keep growing So yeah this is the ah the curse of being stocklisted, unfortunately. It doesn't matter how much money you make, you need to make more every quarter.
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So they're doing these things to get an edge, right? And not, you know, as soon as ChatGPT launched, their stock price fell like 10% or something. Was it 5e? I mean, that's immense for a company the size of Google.
00:40:04
Speaker
Holy cow. Yeah. So the the only reason they bought Adventure Gamers is probably because it was a bit cheaper. and had high authority and they thought, okay, we can turn this into a gambling portal.
00:40:15
Speaker
And learning from the mistakes that did with Techopedia, they think, okay, maybe this is in a niche that Google won't penalize so we can get away with it. Right. And if they rank, they'll make their money back in a week, basically.
00:40:28
Speaker
Wow. Okay. is wild. So yeah, they absolutely don't need the adventure game fans. They don't need the people who were coming to the site. It doesn't matter to them. yeah They couldn't care less. Yes, because it just immediately brings them more money.
00:40:44
Speaker
Wow. So who ClickOut Media? Who are these people? All right. So ClickOut Media, I wrote about this in my articles on reclator.com. Some self-promotion there. We will ah link those in the show notes. They are very comprehensive. Yeah. yeah ah Thank you.
00:41:02
Speaker
So it's Adam Grunberg and Samuel Miranda, but there's a few more key people, but those are mostly the ones okay in charge here. And they do parasite SEO. That's all they do. They have a long history in gambling. And when they discovered they were early with discovering the parasite SEO work.
00:41:20
Speaker
So what they'll do is they'll buy projects, they'll pump them up. And when they die, they die to just buy new ones because they make their money back in a month. So they don't really care if the site of Adventure Gamers dies off. They'll get what they get out of it and then they'll just go to a different website. Exactly.
00:41:36
Speaker
And they're buying everything as far as I know. Do they generally leave the sites up forever or do they eventually take them down? no they leave them up forever. Most thing is cheap, so it doesn't matter. it might come back. You know, if you get penalized, usually after three, four years, you get back out of it automatically.
00:41:51
Speaker
And Google does change their minds and rules a lot. Optimizing for Google is like finding a cure for a virus, but the damn virus mutates every three months. So now you have to basically you know find a new cure for it.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's it's thousands of, if if not millions of people's jobs to find ways around yeah whatever new roles Google has created. So, of course. Okay, so Adam Grunewald Samuel Miranda, they've been doing this for a long time.
00:42:20
Speaker
Their main company is not called ClickOut Media. It's called Phenixio. It's the same thing. It's just the same thing. oh Yeah, basically, they were getting in a lot of trouble with the FCA in the UK because they're doing a lot of illegal meme coin.
00:42:35
Speaker
Oh, okay. I have a huge article series about that. Yes. Yeah. And so they just moved it to Malta, i said they sold it, named it ClickOut. But it's the same owners. It's the same people behind. Right.
00:42:49
Speaker
just kind of like a name rebrand as to just to avoid bad press. Yeah. Kind of like how Xfinity named themselves Xfinity after Comcast was like, no one liked Comcast, so they renamed. No, it's not about renaming. It's about escaping the authorities.
00:43:03
Speaker
so they yeah Oh my God. Okay. Because they're you know potentially facing a lot of prison time. And if you can just sell it to yourself, you know problem solved. odd These guys get it like it's not just video games, right? Like they've been purchasing up just a variety of sites like they just want as many sites as possible.
00:43:23
Speaker
No, they want high authority sites, but yeah, as many as possible. They're basically competing against themselves in the rankings. So they started with tech blog sites. They had, you know, business to community, uh, read, write, take a pedia, and then they all get penalized.
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah. No saving them for now anyway. So they started looking into, okay, what's a niche. that has, you know, high authority backlinks. You know, it's going to be gaming, right?
00:43:48
Speaker
If they could buy Kotaku, they would. Sure. Yeah. yeah And they run these, you know, online gambling sites or they have deals with them? like Both. actually Yeah. Okay.
00:43:59
Speaker
So they have, ClickOut Media has all sorts of employees listed and they have a contact page on their website. I've reached out to them several times about this.
00:44:10
Speaker
They have not responded at Well, okay. On LinkedIn, a man named Jonathan, who probably doesn't exist, I'm guessing, reached out and told me to go through their contact pat page. But yeah, nothing nothing, heard nothing from them. No, it's not in their interest.
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if anything, they're gaining on this ah negative feedback because Kotaku wrote about them. That's a mention, right? Right. Right. That helps their link profile.
00:44:37
Speaker
It helps their link profile because people will go to the site after reading Kotaku or it helps their link profile just because. Just because. mean, even if Kotaku doesn't link, they mention the brand name. And that's, I believe, a ranking factor for AI overlays or whatever Google calls it now.
00:44:55
Speaker
a i say So they go by brand mentions. ChatGPT does, pretty sure. Interesting. Okay, so this is such a complicated little web of things that just our little, you know, niche video gaming community just kind of got yanked into.
00:45:11
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah There's so much of this that I don't think we are going to grasp, but I think it's at least clear who ClickOut Media is and why they would want.
00:45:22
Speaker
Can i give you another example? Actually? Yeah. Yeah, please please. All right. So, you know, I told you about how Google removed localization and topical authority. So a good example, I think, is let's say you have an election. You want to be mayor of some small little town, wherever, you know, 10,000 inhabitants.
00:45:40
Speaker
hmm. But now anyone can vote and every vote makes your case stronger. So by default, you're going to win this election because you get everyone to vote. Yeah. And, ah you know, links are the same way. It's a vote up. There are bad links and good links. But in general, you know, a New York Times vote or link would be worth 10 times 100 times more than.
00:46:01
Speaker
you know, somebody's blog link. Yeah. well That's the best way I think I can explain it. I have a question. I don't know if there's an answer to it or not, but when websites are are sold like that, the, so the person who sold it, would they know what kind of website they were selling to?
00:46:19
Speaker
Like, would they know that it was? They wouldn't start by saying, oh, by the way, we're deleting the forums, turning it all into WordPress and just adding tons of illegal gambling to it.
00:46:29
Speaker
Right. Hope you don't mind. yeah So they don't need to they don't need to disclose that stuff? No. all units and i mean How much do you need to disclose when you're selling your car? Does it work? Yeah? Okay.
00:46:40
Speaker
Have look. It's a dick move, but yeah, no, I totally. Also I killed three people in it before. I don't know if you have to disclose that. anywhere or no Right. Right. Yeah.
00:46:51
Speaker
Well, I asked cause a lot of people are upset, you know, not sam though you know, because they assumed that he knew exactly the details and and who he was selling this to.
00:47:02
Speaker
No, because they try, I mean, unless he found my articles, I mean, they, basically snuff out any bad PR on them with lawyer threats and stuff. So I don't think he could have known.
00:47:15
Speaker
For all he knew was, okay, he's getting out of it. He's getting paid and they're going to continue the community. Yeah. But you'd have to ask him. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But in no way did he know they would delete the forum and turn it into a gambling portal. Yeah. So have you spoken to anybody who has, accident you know, I want to say accidentally, that's a weird word to choose, but who has sold their sites to ClickOut or Phoenixio unknowingly?
00:47:42
Speaker
Unknowingly, no. ah They always knew it was ClickOut or Phenix. Okay. Okay. But have you spoken to somebody who went through something similar to what Evo Teal did? where Oh, yeah.
00:47:52
Speaker
How do those transactions go down? like how How do they earn the trust of that person? I mean, money thoughts? Money. Yeah, money. The number must have been right, you know? Yeah, that's fair. How much could adventure gamers have earned, really?
00:48:07
Speaker
Yeah. And if they offer 10 times that, which to them is peanuts and they know they're going to make it back in a month. right yeah Our understanding is that Adventure Gamers was losing money.
00:48:18
Speaker
um And the only it was only keeping afloat Patreon subscribers. and So I guess it wouldn't have... I imagine wouldn't have taken a lot of money. But Evo Teal is very obviously very upset that like you know a decade of work that he put in is now gone. yeah So my my guess is it either was a substantial sum or... there had to have been conversations in which he believed these people were going to be caretakers yeah of what was there.
00:48:46
Speaker
so Yeah, probably. mean, unless it's stated in the contract, you have to keep community alive. They don't have to. ah Yeah. right yeah And yeah like you're saying, even if they break a contract, what's going to come of it?
00:48:57
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I mean, they're Malta based and Malta has a wonderful law that says you cannot sue them. wow You can't sue anybody in Malta. Right. wow More or less, basically. But it's getting appealed because Europe does not like that.
00:49:12
Speaker
Of course. So you're working on a six-part series about, you know, this, again, this Phenixio click out. Their whole deal, and it's, again, very comprehensive. We'll link it in the in the show notes But there was so much of it that flew over my head, my little video game reviewer head. But this has been incredibly illuminating. i didn't know that about Malta. I didn't know. Yeah.
00:49:37
Speaker
So thank you so much. No problem. Now, that all having been said, Timothy, you're also a big gamer. Huge gamer. I need a game a day minimum.
00:49:47
Speaker
Yeah. What? What do you play? What are your what do you like? Right now, it's mostly strategy games. Oh, wow. Oh, fun. used to be RPGs. I mean, the only reason I'm talking English to you right now is because Baldur's Gate 2. Oh, nice. have you Have you dipped into Baldur's Gate 3?
00:50:06
Speaker
I have not. I don't have time. I want to, but I know how many hours that's going to take. but Yeah, absolutely. yeah One of my friends is like on her third playthrough, 300 hours. I'm like, how?
00:50:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I've gotten quite old now, so I'm more into, okay, can I play for one hour? Yeah, okay, cool. We'll play that. So a lot of Dota, some Diablo 4.
00:50:28
Speaker
I started playing some Dune Awakening. Amazing game. Oh, okay. I haven't played it. haven't played it. what's so Yeah. Can you tell us about Dune Awakening? What's it appeal? I mean it's um want to say it's like an RPG slash Minecraft, really.
00:50:43
Speaker
Gather resources, you build a base, you do missions. Fantastic game, really. One of the best I've played the last few years. Nice. That's awesome. And also Time Sink, yeah. ah you You said you're a big strategy game guy. What's a strategy game you've played recently that you really loved? Let's see here. Sins of the Solar Empire 2. Okay.
00:51:02
Speaker
Gets a bit repetitive in the end, but really good. Frostpunk, obviously. love that. Oh, I've heard many good things about Frostpunk, but I've never played it. haven't it? Mm-mm. Probably one of my favorite games is Ixion. You probably haven't heard of that, but it's a space game.
00:51:18
Speaker
Amazing. This is very familiar. look at that. Yeah, the soundtrack is amazing. I love it. I love a game with a good soundtrack. Ixion, I-X-I-O-N? Yeah. I have 65 hours in I completed it four times.
00:51:30
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Nice. Yeah. It's amazing. I love that game. Yeah. you You know, if you're repeating your gameplay and you're wanting to play it again, that's a good game. Yeah. It's one of the few games I wanted to, you know, complete all the achievements on.
00:51:43
Speaker
Yeah. And I still haven't succeeded. What is it that you love so much about it? I mean, it's a it's a strategy base builder, right? You're on a. Okay.
00:51:54
Speaker
Space Station, more or less, and you have to find resources and time is running out. I love those. I mean, it's Frostbite, basically, but in space. Right. And it has a storyline. It's pretty good, I think, but it's very short.
00:52:06
Speaker
But the soundtrack and the atmosphere just makes it so good. I highly recommend that one. That's what I love finding out about the games that people have put just so much time into because you know, even if it's not your thing, you know, there's something really special there.
00:52:23
Speaker
Yeah. No, at least for me, ah you don't even want to know how many hours I have in Dota 2. yeah I kind of do i do. I kind of do want to know. but Keep in mind, i played the beta and this is like 15 years of playing.
00:52:38
Speaker
Okay. 6,000 hours? Oh, 6,000. i got I told you was a gamer. Yeah, yeah. Hey, i'm I'm really impressed. Yeah.
00:52:51
Speaker
right Because I have always had my own company. So I didn't have like, you'd have to be at work at nine. and i didn't have to travel anywhere. So when I was younger, I was like 23, 24. I was like, I need a win before I can start working. And sometimes that took seven hours.
00:53:06
Speaker
Yeah, I hear it. Yeah, a horrible addiction, but so much fun. We all need our our one little addiction that we... Our one little vice, yeah. Or, you know, maybe a couple. Who knows? Yeah, and you you basically shut off your brain, right? From stress from life and just focus on this task. That's really relaxing, I think.
00:53:26
Speaker
Timothy, thank you so much for being here and helping us to understand a part of the story that we really, I don't think, could have fully grasped yeah without your help.
00:53:39
Speaker
Yeah, I'm happy i'm happy to be part of it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, it's a whole different world. When you look at the search engine optimization, it's, but it's not really technical. It's very low tech. Oh yeah.
00:53:52
Speaker
Yeah. Once you get used to all the the words and the whatnot, it's not that hard. What's hard is ranking. That's hard, but got you the basics of SEO, no, you can read a yeah article about it. It's pretty, I mean, easy to grasp once you get into it. I mean, it's way easier than for say, say learning a boulder's gate.
00:54:16
Speaker
ah yeahbars or do I think that's a good place for us to wrap up.
00:54:24
Speaker
If you want to read Timothy's work and follow what he does, check him out at recludo.com. R-E-C-L-E-U-D-O. We will put a link in the show notes.
00:54:52
Speaker
So that was our interview with Timothy. This interview was very enlightening ah to me. And one of the most important things I wanted to ask was, would Ivo know?
00:55:04
Speaker
Because he's getting a lot of criticism. And I want to be fair and empathetic with people. Because again, at the end of the day, we're just trying to survive. I think empathy is very important. So I wanted to know if he would know.
00:55:18
Speaker
And Timothy had said something that I think makes a lot of sense and and I think will speak to a lot of us is that who you're selling something to in business, they don't have to tell you who they are. yeah Like the buyer doesn't have to tell – like when you when you sell something on like Facebook Marketplace. Mm-hmm.
00:55:37
Speaker
Are you vetting the buyer? They could be a bad person. They could use what they bought for something terrible, but you probably are not going to know about that. And I do not think that Evo knew all of the intention, especially if he felt fooled.
00:55:52
Speaker
Yeah. I don't think he knew what they were. I mean, if they're a parasite person, ah What is it? Parasite SEO company? Parasite SEO company. And that's, that's I mean, so... I'm not going to One thing that he breaks down um when he's when he, in his exploration of Phenixio, is that there's like there's there's three levels to what they're doing, right? Like the first is this SEO thing.
00:56:16
Speaker
optimization right they're trying to get to the top of every search you know without get around um google's seo filters the next thing that they're looking for sort of their mid mid funnel he calls it is people who are interested in these sites they want he they are trying to get people to click through to casino and gambling sites and the bottom funnel is the actual money they make from their casinos and the meme coins that they yeah they... I guess what sounds to me like pump and dump scams, right? Like you write um create a meme coin, you will own a that i'm I'm going to get some of this.
00:56:56
Speaker
we probably should have asked him about this, but you... hold back a certain share of those meme coins or you sell them to sort of you sell or give them to priority buyers and shareholders so that they look like they're doing really well they look like they've sold a ton and then your average consumer gets in and buys a ton then those people who started out with a bunch of those meme coins sell them right away And then they make a ton of money and then everybody else is left holding the bag. That's my understanding of it. And that's kind of what these people are involved in.
00:57:31
Speaker
yeah And that's why I say like, I would like to have, i would like, and this is not speaking to people's like interpersonal problems that they've had. Like we've taught, we've spoken to Jack Allen who had to, who worked alongside Eva for a while.
00:57:46
Speaker
And Jack is understandably frustrated, but I do have some empathy for Eva because it really does. Like I said, when a person buys something from you, they don't have to disclose their intentions.
00:57:58
Speaker
Yeah, i I have some empathy for Evo, and I think we'll talk more about that maybe as as we wrap up. I do want to talk about like what any of this means. What should we take away from fucking any of this? Or is it just a weird tragedy? Yeah, or is there anything? is this just the nature of business and domains and SEO and kind of where we're at, you know? But I do think there's more to be said about Evo's time as the head of Adventure Gamers, and think As you mentioned, another person we had on the show, Jack Allen, has a lot to say about that. I think Jack also has a lot to say about the importance of adventure gamers and what was great about it and, you know, and where a lot of that talent went, right? Like these, yeah the people who made that site what it is are not gone.
00:58:50
Speaker
We are all still around. Yeah. We just are at different places now. Most of us at one specific place, ah but... One a very specific targeted place, yes.
00:59:04
Speaker
You want to talk to Jack Allen? Yeah, let's let's hear what Jack has to say.
00:59:28
Speaker
We have a special guest. Today we have with us Jack Allen. Jack, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. And I assume when you say special, you have the air quotes around the special part? Never! No.
00:59:44
Speaker
I've never used air quotes in my entire life. Well, I meant sort of figuratively speaking air quotes. Air quotes around the air quotes. Otherwise, I don't think I quite fit that description. No, you absolutely do. hard to be here.
00:59:57
Speaker
You absolutely do. you ah So if people don't know Jack, and you should, he is the editor of Adventure Game Hotspot, former editor to our subject today of Adventure Gamers, and just an you know a writer and editor of many, many different video game related things.
01:00:18
Speaker
i would say I would say Adventure Game expert. Oh. you've You've got to be by now, right? i I'm not going to argue with you. Well, actually, I am. You're completely wrong. but i'm like Oh, okay. All right. I appreciate the vi gesture.
01:00:33
Speaker
I think we should probably start at the beginning, right? Because we're talking about... Tell us about your childhood. Yeah, so you're Canadian, right? No. I am Canadian, yes.
01:00:44
Speaker
No, that is important to there. Adventure Gamers was around before you came on the scene, right? Yeah, it started out sort of a very small kind of LucasArts fan club-y sort of thing.
01:00:58
Speaker
Survived like that for a little while, and kind of fell off the grid and kind of came back as sort of a fledgling version of what it ultimately became, which was more of a all about adventure games and moving forward and stuff like that.
01:01:13
Speaker
So, and I came in, it was like 2004, I think. So just as a writer, you know, I liked the direction they seem to be going. i liked their presentation. and i thought, oh, I could contribute to this.
01:01:25
Speaker
And I was still fairly new to adventure games at the time. So it just seemed like an interesting thing to do. And As tends to happen, I kind of failed upward and within a year I was kind of running the joint. So, yeah. did you So did you come in as a fan or did you come in as like, I want to i want to write and here's an opportunity to do that?
01:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, I just like I had no illusions of sort of rising through the ranks or anything. I just thought, hey, I found adventure games. I like them. i can write. so I can contribute reviews.
01:02:00
Speaker
Here, have some. Oh, we like. Can you do more and more and more and more and more, please? um And I stupidly kept saying yes. So they realized they had an easy mark on their hands.
01:02:13
Speaker
You then got promoted up to, was it Editor-in-Chief? Was that your title? Editor-in-Chief, yeah. Yeah. And the owner at the time was Merrick Bronstring? Yep. Great guy. Love Merrick.
01:02:24
Speaker
Is he still an adventure game dude? No, he's pretty much sort of removed himself from that whole scene. He got more into sort of real world travel type stuff. and But I still hear from him occasionally. And he was very upset when I got let go from my adventure gamers and very supportive of adventure game hotspot when we started that. So, yeah, he's kind of always been in my corner and and he was he was great to work.
01:02:51
Speaker
so and I got gotta to say before we get to the sad stuff, we're probably going to talk about I call him Evo Teal. I know you call him Evo, but I might I might have it wrong. I don't know. I've never heard it. I don't know.
01:03:04
Speaker
I've never heard him say it out loud. I had a pretty good relationship with him, too. It was. Yeah. Arm's length. We sort of rarely communicated and sort of just by email when we did. But yeah, it's sort of the whole messy.
01:03:19
Speaker
divorce kind of came out of nowhere. Wow. Because, you know, I had i had a solid relationship with them up to that, a working relationship up to that point. Well, so your years editor-in-chief, this site did kind of grow. like Yeah, they're the they're the website that definitely made its mark. And, you know, i think Adventure Gamers, though maybe probably not the first ah to do what they're doing, probably one of the best before they were bought.
01:03:48
Speaker
yeah Right. Well, thank Well, until they let me go, i would like to say, but because really that's, and that I know it sounds boastful, but that is the honest truth. I mean, the site has been sort of a shell of its former self ever since then. And that was probably inevitable, but so anyway, thank you. i appreciate that. And I've sort of, when the news of the sale hit and stuff like that, there's been a lot of people saying, oh man, Adventure Gamers was a big part of this and I always relied on them for that. And,
01:04:23
Speaker
I mean, even though it wasn't specifically directed at me, it was very gratifying to hear it because, ah thought yeah um you know, that's what I sank so many ridiculously insane hours into doing. And it was never for the acclaim. It was never like it was never about me. It was just to celebrate the job. I know that you you don't get into adventure games for the acclaim.
01:04:48
Speaker
Like I did adventure game reviews on YouTube for many, many years and I did it because I loved it So your departure from the site, like you said, it kind of came out of nowhere.
01:04:59
Speaker
You had become... This had become a job for you, not your main job, correct? you just Right. a job and took up a lot of your time and focus.
01:05:10
Speaker
um Right. No, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, no. If you have context, please. um Yeah, just a little bit. Like I know, especially... um you're going to be talking about the Kotaku article and stuff, which which yeah sort of brought up some of the details. And I think ostensibly the parting was because of money.
01:05:31
Speaker
And right I don't want people to think that, you know, I was, you know, pressuring anyone for big bucks or anything. I did the math at one point.
01:05:41
Speaker
Like, you're right. it It's not my full-time job. I'm sort of a freelance writer, editor for sort of a bunch of clients. of which adventure gamers and now adventure game hotspot is just one of them but like it's a huge commitment you wouldn't necessarily look think it to look at just the website but right with the database and all the research and everything behind it it's like ah full-time hours like a full-time jobs worth of hours um and i did the math at one point and it was like half of minimum wage that i was getting paid so
01:06:18
Speaker
Like it was just enough to make it possible for me to sink that much time into it. It wasn't me trying to get rich. of Like, like I can't sacrifice that many hours in a month and not have anything at all to show for. So I was just, you know, whatever scrapping I did for money was just to sort of maintain that bare minimum of,
01:06:46
Speaker
like I can't do the job if I don't have at least this much. So right like, I just want the record straight there that when we talk about money, it's not like hard negotiating and give me more and it's just like,
01:07:01
Speaker
You know, I got to live, man. Yeah, no, that's fair. And I'm barely doing that with the money I'm making. So I can't be less. When did Ivo purchase the site? well Do you recall what that transition was like?
01:07:15
Speaker
It was pretty smooth, as I understand it. I believe it was nine years ago. Okay. um And Merrick was sort of adamant that it kind of go to a good home. Yeah.
01:07:26
Speaker
So he was he was very selective and Evo seemed like a good candidate at the time. And I spoke to him at the time and he did. he seemed like a good guy. He seemed genuinely interested in the genre.
01:07:38
Speaker
And yeah he understood that it was a package deal, the site and me, which again, was not to be pushy. It was just because the site wouldn't exist if I weren't putting the crazy hours into it that I did. This is not to take away anything from the writers whose work was utterly invaluable, but just to make things go needs a great deal of time and attention. So I was already good at it. By that time, the site sort of exploded in size and reach and and sort of was the premier adventure game website. and so
01:08:14
Speaker
How do you feel like in that time between when Evo took over and you were, as you said, kind of forced out, how do you feel like the site changed in that time? i In terms of content, it just kind of kept getting bigger and better. Sort of nothing stood in the way of that.
01:08:31
Speaker
Now, this was around the time when Sort of online advertising sort of fell off a cliff and became worthless and right paper magazines were dying and online magazines were suffering and stuff. So that hit us too.
01:08:46
Speaker
So finances were an issue. So at some point, a few years after ebo bought the site, we we did a Patreon and got you know a fairly nice public support, monthly support that kept us going.
01:09:01
Speaker
And that really helped. And I guess over the years, you know people tend to drop out here and there and gradually the amount goes down. And so at sort of early 2022, kind of said to me,
01:09:15
Speaker
I can't pay you anymore. So we're in trouble. Right. Okay. Fair enough. So I said, before we make any far reaching decisions here, let's do another Patreon drive, see where it goes.
01:09:28
Speaker
I spearheaded that under the assumption that we would keep providing the same kind of amount and quality of content. And the the response was fantastic. Like again, not big bucks at all, but you know, for a niche,
01:09:43
Speaker
adventure game website a very very positive response so i'm sitting there thinking great okay well like i might even get a raise out of this uh but at the very least we're in the clear to keep going status quo and you know when my next deposit was sort of two-thirds of what it was supposed to be with no forewarning or anything. Yeah, the writing was kind of on the wall at that point.
01:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, i still don't understand it. Like because the patron brought in more money, and you were being paid less. yeah Exactly. Yeah, we were absolutely in a position to continue at the amount I was being paid. And there's no discussion about it?
01:10:25
Speaker
No. And so obviously, I was upset, started writing them. And I just got like silence for weeks. Wow. And I think his reasoning was, I mean, it was so poorly explained.
01:10:41
Speaker
This is kind of speculation on my part, but I think he was just thinking ahead. And it's like, okay, yeah, our revenue is okay now, but it's going to start going down again.
01:10:53
Speaker
And before we get into that situation again, you know, let's just rip the bandaid off now kind Which I, whatever. Okay, it's flimsy, but it was just handled so badly and so disrespectfully. And, you know, I don't know.
01:11:10
Speaker
I really don't know where his mind was at. And he didn't make much of an effort to explain it. I mean, considering you made a good amount on Patreon, were there...
01:11:22
Speaker
other financial issues that the Patreon had to pick up slack for, and thus he was not able good to ever be able to afford to pay you? um No, I don't think so. like I was, like, all of the staff outside of me was volunteer, and there are sort of normal website expenses, server costs, stuff like that, but yeah no, there were no sort of extraneous expenses that I knew of that would have any impact on that, and certainly none that were conveyed to me.
01:11:53
Speaker
So anyway, yeah, it's after sort of a few kind of terse yet still polite emails, you know, his last one was sort of well, clearly we don't see eye to eye and I have a different vision for the site for you. So, you know, clear out your locker and be gone by the end of the month, which was like three days. oh I'm paraphrasing, but, right you know, by the end of the month, which was like three days away.
01:12:19
Speaker
um I
Personal Journeys and New Opportunities
01:12:20
Speaker
didn't light it. I didn't argue. i didn't anything. I just fine. All right. That's where we are. So that's that. Yeah, I remember that. I was writing for the site at the time. I remember it being incredibly shocking. And i remember just having sort of no idea of what to do then.
01:12:42
Speaker
i remember getting your email and you said, you know, any kind of and any contact you have from now on should be with Evo. And he'll be running the site. He'll be editing from now on.
01:12:54
Speaker
And I remember just thinking, like, should I should I leave? but Should I keep doing this? I was tempted to do my Jerry Maguire moment, right? Like, I'm leaving. Who's with me? Yeah, that wouldn't have been very.
01:13:09
Speaker
responsible. Yeah, I didn't when I left, obviously, it was very sudden for me, too. And yeah, I certainly didn't leave to start another website. I and kind of had the rug pulled out from under me and certainly wasn't immediately thinking of doing that.
01:13:30
Speaker
The thought was daunting enough when it did cross my mind a few months later. So he he said he would um let me announce my own departure, which I think he thought it sort of saved face like, Hey, I wasn't fired. I'm leaving under my own terms kind of thing. But for like, I don't care about, but I also didn't want to throw the site under the bus. I didn't want to make it mean and nasty. So I did, I just announced my departure and kind of hinted at some of the reasons, but made it sound kind of mutual. But
01:14:05
Speaker
In in a respect, it was mutual because if he hadn't let me go and just said, well, the fact of the matter is this is all I can pay you, I probably would have had to have left anyway.
01:14:16
Speaker
So sure how we got there kind of didn't matter. So yeah, I bowed out and like it wasn't, it wasn't a bloodbath. It was very quiet. And i mean, I'm the only one that, well, no, I was go to say I'm the only one that suffered for it, but that is,
01:14:32
Speaker
completely not true because it turned out to be kind of a good thing. You know, the saying one door closes another opens kind of thing. That was certainly true for me. I was very fortunate to be exposed to a number of different projects, including writing for Fogtown, which is a project that I absolutely love. And we're still in the middle of writing that game.
01:14:54
Speaker
And of course, starting Adventure Game Hotspot with Joshua has been incredible. And that's led to all sorts of different things. So Like I've sort of done really well and i've I've been happy with the last three years kind of thing, but I was still mad a little bit. yeah But I also knew that Adventure Gamers was gonna die.
01:15:16
Speaker
And again, that may sound boastful, but it's not. I knew it takes a certain kind of person to be that committed to a site day in, day out.
01:15:28
Speaker
That certain sort of person is an insane person.
01:15:33
Speaker
Dang it, I should have bought it. I'm an insane person. I am that insane. So I not only left ah that same situation, I started a whole new one. But oh boy what is the matter of me?
01:15:48
Speaker
Going through my emails at that time. So that year departure email ah was on March 26th. You had been there since since what year? How long have you been at Adventure Gamers? As a reviewer, I started in 2004. I was running it by 2005, I believe. Wow. wow Jack used to send out these big, long lists of games that he had codes for or games that they he wanted the site to review. and And Evo sent them out for a couple weeks later.
01:16:17
Speaker
And I don't know if he kept sending them out, but he stopped sending them to me. Yeah. No, I think he just, because it's a lot of work. It's not, you know, Matt, you know, begging can get pretty pathetic when I then send those review comments.
01:16:34
Speaker
Somebody, please, please take this. Adventure Gamers lasted another almost three years. And over that time, i don't want to throw any reviewers under the bus.
01:16:46
Speaker
um I think probably the people who are writing for that site are very passionate. They're probably very good writers. This site, I think, suffered from maybe a lack of editorial oversight.
01:16:59
Speaker
Yeah. big The reviews got shorter, the reviews got more um casual in tone, the same level of review you might read on Steam, a good st reviewer.
01:17:10
Speaker
um Then, I guess early June is when Evo sold the site. And how did you find out about that? I found out pretty much like everyone else did.
01:17:22
Speaker
Just sort of somebody texted me a Twitter message or something saying, have you seen this kind of thing? And I'm like, well, I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you know when that was? Yeah, it was a couple of weeks ago, I think a few weeks ago.
01:17:38
Speaker
was, there was no advanced notice. It was already kind of Twitter was already sort of blowing up and right. You know, so it was, when it first kind of hit the airwaves that the forums were closed and the gambling ads were all over the place and stuff like that. So, and you know, the about page had been changed and stuff.
01:17:57
Speaker
I learned about it before you did, but not sort of before anybody else. It was very much public knowledge by the time I found out. so I feel a little like I was the last person to know. I found out i last week. Well, no, I was.
01:18:11
Speaker
I was the last person because I found out from you. and I'm like, what the heck is this? Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting because I think that adventure games have been so popular recently. So it's interesting that adventure gamers, because their quality had gone down, they were kind of flailing in this era of adventure games being so popular. It's very strange.
01:18:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, they they just didn't have the sort of management or the staff to to do it anymore. And I also want to make clear that when Joshua and I started Adventure Game Hotspot, I didn't sort of raid Adventure Gamers for all its talent.
01:18:50
Speaker
are I did, but it was like purely voluntary and I made it clear like anybody who still feels loyal to Adventure Gamers can can write for both sides, whatever. I just needed to know there was enough kind of staff support to make a new site work. And when i found out that it was, um then we went ahead.
01:19:11
Speaker
But I mean, I think first of all, the reason was i hope anyway that I had such a good relationship with my writers built up for so many years, but also they were starting to see the writing on the wall in terms of what Adventure Gamers was doing.
01:19:27
Speaker
um yeah Like not just the the reviews, but kind of all the news and stuff, that front page was completely redone and it seemed like almost lab manufactured for clicks kind of thing not for content anymore it wasn't about being a positive contribution anymore it was about let's get some clicks um you know oh a new game is steam deck verified let's get a post up you know it's like come on that's nothing really from the day adventure game hotspot
01:20:04
Speaker
opened, which was October of 2022. So really not that long after I left. right Like it's sort of a miraculously small amount of time to pull all that together.
01:20:17
Speaker
Like we were from that point on Adventure Gamers 2.0. And yet as I perhaps not very kindly think of it, Adventure Gamers became Adventure Gamers 0.5. it was...
01:20:32
Speaker
um like it was It was no longer what Adventure Gamers used to be. We were. Right. You know, so. And Adventure Game Hotspot rose ah to prominence in the community really fast. So before we we, do you want to explain to everybody, not that people listening to this don't know, but ah talk a little bit about a Adventure Game Hotspot and what it's doing now. it is anything and everything sort of current genre related, you know, reviews, interviews, news,
01:21:03
Speaker
announcements videos trailers our own podcast kind of thing so like we do it all and we update it every day and um yeah it's just a lot going on and i gotta say when when i took over adventure gamers i don't know what the exact number was but when i first started the aggie awards i think maybe five years later um there were 50 adventure games released that 50. And now we're like 400, 500. Yeah.
01:21:38
Speaker
five hundred yeah I was going to say like 50. d yeah's like Yeah. That's, that's a lot for adventure games, but nothing compared to what we're seeing, you know, right now. No, exactly. Like it's yeah so much now.
01:21:51
Speaker
It's wild. and I've had to start sort of really curating. Like I can't cover everything because everything is another demand on my time. And, It's not about me, but i there's only so much of me to go around. So like there are literally dozens of sort of one hour horror games with a flashlight released every month now. And so, you know, most of those get swept away and I just focus on the ones that sort of
01:22:23
Speaker
seem to stand out more and but yeah it's so it's a lot that's like a lot i think it was over 400 games last year um so crazy to hear it really is yeah and we're not talking the big sort of lucas art sierra days but uh you know there's a lot of interesting stuff so you know Yeah, and I mean, I think, you know, let's be real. I think that indie games of any genre are certainly at the top right now. It is so rare that I buy a AAA game.
01:22:59
Speaker
I don't need to. I got all my games right here in the indie space, right here on Steam, and most of them are adventure games, yeah which is wild to me. Because I remember when when I was a kid, just looking for any adventure games, like in-store, online for download. It was tough.
01:23:17
Speaker
ah The pickings were slim. Right. right So I did hear something about some efforts to get writers' works republished in other places ah with their credit restored.
01:23:29
Speaker
What news do you have on that front? We are giving some thought to maybe republishing anybody's work. who wants it on the hotspot with obviously their bylines restored, but you know, that's, that's tricky because there's sort of legal considerations and Google considerations to consider. Cause if Google considers it duplicate work, then we're penalized.
01:23:57
Speaker
for doing it and and it's messy and ugly. But and mean, I haven't given up. wonder though, is it duplicate work if ah if Adventure Gamers has essentially erased the credit given to these writers?
Curation and Content Rights Issues
01:24:12
Speaker
Well, right. And if there's an actual person looking into the matter, I'm sure that's what they would come up with. But it probably isn't. It's all algorithm drill driven and they're going to go, well, this content has been on this website for you know, so many years and the here's this Johnny come lately, just posting the same thing. Anyway, so I haven't given up. Like I, I think there's an avenue to, to at least getting writer credit restored. I'm, I feel really strongly about that. I feel horrible that it was removed from adventure gamers and I wasn't malicious. It was like a database driven thing.
01:24:51
Speaker
um So they, they wiped out the user database and then with it went all the, author names. So, oh, okay. Or at least that's what I imagine it to be. Anyway, like it they were never sort of hard coded into the articles. It sort of drew from the database. And so that's what I imagine happened.
01:25:14
Speaker
Interesting. And I know there was a bunch of ah writers who were specifically asking, their names to be taken off anyway before before it happened automatically because they didn't want their work to be used to shill online gambling. so right It's like this holy trinity of bad stuff. It's crypto, it's gambling, and it's AI. it's the What? yeah yeah it Yeah, exactly. It's the triple crown of horrible, that's for sure.
01:25:43
Speaker
Quickly, Matt, and because I know you're passionate about this, like maybe you... are one of the people that drives it. What I would like to see happen is for somebody to contact those new owners, ClickOutMedia, I think you said correct the name was. Correct. ClickOutMedia. And sort of say, um either restore my bylines or you no longer have permission to carry my work.
01:26:13
Speaker
and Like I would like to see somebody sort of take a ah firm stand and see how they react to it. And like, if they refuse to restore bylines after that, then to me, that sort of allows for safer ground to maybe do some republishing. I don't know, but, uh, well, I know you've been reaching out trying to get them to talk to you, but I'm talking about reaching out to saying, to say,
01:26:39
Speaker
look what you've done isn't acceptable and you can't use my work anymore if sure yeah you don't change. So, yeah, I think that might have to be done through a lawyer. It seems like they're ignoring a lot of people in a lot of ways.
01:26:53
Speaker
um Right. Yeah. Well, Jack, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about this. ah Thanks for having me. yeah Please have me on for a fun show. I would love to. Yeah, we'll have you on for not hard news. but okay What game would you want to come on and talk about?
01:27:11
Speaker
Oh, Keeper. Keeper? The new game from Double Flying. Oh, it's not out yet, but it's not yet. That's what I'm really excited. But it's coming out like fairly soon. Hey, maybe when that comes out, we'll do ah we'll do an episode about it and bring you on for it. All right. right top yeah you didn't that. You didn't know about it?
01:27:31
Speaker
know I don't know about anything ever.
01:28:05
Speaker
So that was our interview with Jack Allen. Matt, how do you feel about that interview? Because there was certainly, um ah you know, a frustrated energy, you know, for understandably, he sunk a lot of time in and energy into this website.
01:28:23
Speaker
I fucking get it, man. I like i absolutely get it. i think ah if you were a person who put that as much time and energy into it as Jack did, first of all, I would get the bitter feelings about its...
01:28:39
Speaker
decline right and I do think it was a decline like I think Evo got in over his head I think Evo couldn't make the site run well without Jack and I think it was a decline I also think um you know as Jack sort of illuminates and we talked to John about there was a revenue stream that was coming in and I don't know why Evo told John That it was a one-time thing. It was a Patreon that people were paying monthly.
01:29:10
Speaker
As Jack, you know, explains. I believe that it wasn't enough money for Evo to cover all his costs and pay the site. But it's also the case that it wasn't it wasn't one time. That wasn't true.
01:29:28
Speaker
i don't know. so So some parts of the story obviously are a little strange. and And I get Jack's frustration. ah Also, even if we can see Evo as a victim,
01:29:43
Speaker
it's of of ah of a scam. It's still like if you if I if I had spent years building a house and me and you got married. And we divorced and you got the house that I built. Hmm.
01:30:03
Speaker
Hmm. And then you let it burn down. Right. Right. Yeah. I wouldn't only be heartbroken that you took the house. I'd be like, and you didn't even fucking take care of it. Yeah. I get it.
01:30:16
Speaker
What did you do? And you're like, well, the fire wasn't my fault. And was like, I would not have been so irresponsible to let the house burn down. Like, you know what I mean? Like, and I think that's what's going on here. How did you feel?
01:30:28
Speaker
Yeah, I, it's tough. It's like, it it like I said, it's tough. It does feel like money was a huge issue and kind of a catalyst of why this even happened.
01:30:41
Speaker
So I could see somebody. kind of like scrambling to find a buyer that's going to give you enough money to cover all your losses and to survive. um yeah But yes, I also understand that like if you put so much time and energy on this, and Evo did too, as well as Jack. So that's what leads me to believe that he was more fooled than we're giving credit for because he also put that time. It's also his house that he put time money
01:31:12
Speaker
resources into that also got burned down so right but i don't just want this to be uh you know a um forensic examination of whether we should be mad at evo or not like i do want to think about how this does suck and it is sad and i i while jack has moved on to a adventure game hotspot and he's building something really cool over there and again a lot of the talent has followed him it's it's It's got a, it's a bummer that so much of what was built on his back is fucking gone. I can only, i can say that if it were me, i would be very careful and choosy about who I sold my website to.
01:32:02
Speaker
i kind of look at it this way, right? Cause I have a fairly large YouTube channel. Um, Let's say I was going to because some people do sell their channels. It does happen. ah What if I ah who would I give my channel to? And you have that you will see YouTubers sell to like a terrible conglomerate and then all of their stuff, that like all the content changes. And it's it's really wild. And so for myself.
01:32:28
Speaker
Um, even if I was like kind of scrambling, I do feel that I would still be diligent about who I sold this to. Um, but that I'm, I can only speak for my own intention, you know?
01:32:42
Speaker
Right. ah Yeah. I mean, i don't know. I, I'm, I, again, I'm glad we have another place to go to, but it, you know, one of the things that sucks the worst here. So sucks for Jack.
01:32:56
Speaker
Um, It's rough for the writers. Yes. Given that so much of this work was volunteer... And that so many people put so much work into it.
01:33:06
Speaker
well other Another thing I wanted to do is I did want to hear from somebody who wrote for the site way longer than I did. Who had way more invested um socially and creatively in that site than I did. And somebody who was there from the beginning and saw it change. Saw it change when Jack joined. Saw it change when...
Emily Morganti's Experience and Industry Insights
01:33:28
Speaker
Evo joined, saw it change in a horrible way very recently. And this is actually the person that I first learned about this from. I saw it on her Blue Sky page.
01:33:39
Speaker
So I emailed Emily Morganti. Mm-hmm. And I asked if she would like to come on who we've who we've had some kind of ah communication with. She sometimes helps.
01:33:51
Speaker
She does PR for adventure games. Yeah, I've had I've had communications with Emily for a while now. She's been in the community and in the industry for a very long time.
01:34:03
Speaker
Right. And she is ah one of the one of our contacts that we talk to when we, ah you know, reach out for review codes for games. um So she's a very knowledgeable person. She's been around for a long time. She has been she was connected to Adventure Gamer since the very beginning. And we wanted her to kind of tell her story of this and then talk a little bit about how it affected her.
01:34:47
Speaker
introduced Emily? Oh, and my name is fine. Okay. Emily Morganti. Okay, not like ah you don't know no titles or anything like that? Nah, nah. No titles?
01:34:57
Speaker
Okay. Right now we have Emily Morganti. Emily, thank you so much for being here. thanks for having me, guys. This is cool. Yeah. How did you find adventure gamers in it? Well, why don't we start before that?
01:35:11
Speaker
Okay. Tell us about your childhood. Exactly. Actually, have a story. I have a story about that if you'd like to hear it. Oh, we'd love to. Okay. So this is this is actually my origin story in the adventure game world. Yes. i was about 10 years old, and it was a school night, and my dad came home with a floppy disk from work, and he said, i have a game that I want to show you.
01:35:34
Speaker
It was Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Oh, God. And how old were you? And I was 10. Yes! yeah no! So my dad brings this game home that, you know, that this was the game that was passed around.
01:35:49
Speaker
And for some reason, he thought I should play it with him. he you know to my dad's credit like when the kind of risque things happened um like you had to go buy condoms or you're gonna go you're gonna have sex with a prostitute like he he told me that i had to leave the room for like five minutes and then he'd tell me when i could come back but when you play leager larry together i learned how to play um i don't know if it was poker or blackjack in that game i think it was blackjack but i don't know how to play yeah think it's blackjack Yeah, and we and we played that game together over the course of like three evenings or something. We solved it together.
01:36:23
Speaker
Wow. That's a hard game. It's a tough game. And it was the text parser. And what I remember, like one thing I remember about that is just like having to come up with the words you could use. and Yeah.
01:36:36
Speaker
um you know, trying to figure out how to, almost like how to talk to the text parser and language that it would understand. Yeah. um So that was something that we did together. And then he took me after that, sometime after that to Egghead Software.
01:36:49
Speaker
um I grew up in in the Boston area and we went to Egghead Software and I had birthday money that I think my grandparents sent me. And I bought King's Quest 1 with that. And I remember sending them a thank you note, telling them that I bought a card.
01:37:03
Speaker
animated adventure game, which I copied off of the box. Like, this is what I bought with my money, and my grandparents were probably like, I don't know what you're talking about. um But yes, so that was my that was my entry into the adventure game genre at age 10. And then I played all the CR games. I somehow missed out on LucasArts. I didn't really know that LucasArts was a thing, but I played wow all the CR games. came little bit Later for me too. I started, I also, I was a Sierra kid. I also started. Yeah.
01:37:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But so I played all those games and then I went to college and I kind of stopped playing adventure games and I graduated from college in the year 2000. And I remember like specifically one night I'm like, okay, I'm now I'm out of school. I now have a PC and,
01:37:44
Speaker
That means there's all these games I can play that I never got to play before. I'm going to go down to to the good guys. I was in California at this point. And I was going to go down to good guys. And I was going to get ah an adventure game. And it was like 8 o'clock at night. I'm like, yeah, I'm an adult. I can go out at 8 p.m. and buy a game.
01:37:58
Speaker
And I went down there and there were none. And it was like, what? like Where did they all go? I ended up getting Gabriel Knight 3. And that was fine because I like Gabriel Knight. But that was the only... yeah that was like the only one it's like yeah where are they this is really weird so i started like googling and found out ah much to my surprise that adventure games had died while i was in college right um and that was very upsetting and so then at that point um because i now had a pc i started going to abandonware sites and downloading all of the sierra games i'd never gotten to play because they never came out for the mac so
01:38:33
Speaker
Did you go to Home of the Underdogs? Do you remember that? Yep, yep. love that place. That was a good one. And I think Abandonia, something like that. Abandonia! I spent a lot of time on Abandonia, yeah.
01:38:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I downloaded all those games. I burned them to a CD that I think I still have. And then um around that time, probably like 2001, I found the Adventure Gamers Forum because was...
01:38:58
Speaker
either trying to get a game to run that I couldn't get to run or I was looking for a hint or I just was bored and wanted to you know meet people that liked this weird thing that I liked because I didn't know anybody else who knew what an adventure game was right um named at least yeah yeah in person in real life I didn't know anybody who played adventure games Right. I knew a few and in when I was growing up, but I was always the more the much more into it one than they were. Like, I'd find out that somebody had King's Quest V and be like, can I come to your house every day and can we just play that? And they after a while, they'd be like, can you not come over anymore?
01:39:33
Speaker
not Yeah, this isn't fun. so So was it 2001? Yeah, it was the early, yeah, 2001, 2002, around then. I could probably, well, if the forums were still up, I could look back at the archive forum and tell you exactly what it was, but I don't know for sure.
01:39:50
Speaker
I was also on Boom Boomers at that time. ah That was the other forum I was visiting What was Adventure Gamers like back in 2001? Like, what was your experience there? Well, so I guess actually I should put it in contrast to Game Boomers, which is still around.
01:40:06
Speaker
Game Boomers was like a much gentler community and it was a lot of a lot of women, a lot of older people. not really tech savvy people and they had a great uh trading post there so i i i used to go to um to goodwill to like all the there were like five goodwills between my office and my apartment so i used to go to like these different goodwills that's so good that's awesome this was like the prime era for there to be boxed sierra games and lucas arts games at goodwill because they were like 10 years old and people were cleaning out their garages so i got a i
01:40:37
Speaker
I also have very clear memories that we don't have to get into, but it was a trauma memory of the day I decided to throw away my big computer game boxes because I thought I didn't need them anymore. And i I took everything out and put them in baggies and threw the boxes away and immediately regretted it. Oh, yeah.
01:40:53
Speaker
I spent several years in the early 2000s, like trying to rebuild my collection of big box games. So I'd go to all these Goodwills and then I'd end up with duplicates and I'd look on these forums and trade them for other games. So yeah Game Boomers was really good for that, um you know, getting hints and stuff. And then Adventure Gamers was like the opposite of that. It was like a yeah lot of younger people, guys, a lot of people from Europe.
01:41:17
Speaker
And there was just a vibe to it. and And I'm sure they weren't. They weren't all guys, but there was a ah feeling of there being a lot of guys my age as a poll opposed to older people that there were at the Game Movies firm.
01:41:29
Speaker
you know i i the the the ones The names I can still think of are like people I still know, Jake Rodkin, Chris Remo, Doug Tobacco, Merrick, obviously. you know But there there was a whole crew of those people that also they kind of overlapped with Mixon Mojo and later with Idle Thumbs.
01:41:45
Speaker
that were kind of the core of this um community at Adventure Gamers. and It was interesting. I mean, that was how I learned about LucasArts games, which I hadn't played before. And just, you know, it was people who were around my age or or felt when I was talking to them like they were my age. And we were able to kind of talk and bond about these things that I had never really had friends who got before.
01:42:06
Speaker
um So we used to have really long discussions about like, which was the best Sierra game or like, I remember one very long. Have you guys played um Shadow of Destiny?
01:42:18
Speaker
No. Oh my God. One of my favorite games. It was a Japanese game that came out probably for like PlayStation 1 or PlayStation 2 and was ported to yeah And it had a really obscure PC port. And that's one where i actually remember probably on Adventure Gamers, you know, I was saying, where can I find this game?
01:42:36
Speaker
Yeah. And somebody said, um go into EB games and tell them to look in the back. And what yeah, they were like, it was like, tell them to look in the back. So I remember going into EB games and saying, do you have this game? And the guy was like, no, the game's only out for the PlayStation. I said, no, there's a PC port.
01:42:52
Speaker
And he's like, well, we don't have it And I said, well, go look in the back. And he's like, this guy's like, yeah, whatever. and he goes in looks in the back and he comes back and he's like, oh, you're right. We had three copies back. That's amazing.
01:43:03
Speaker
It was, and that was, it was like this weird underground network of like how to find these games that like stores seem to not even want to try to sell. But that's a game where you, it's, it's a, not a time travel game, but like a time loop game where you keep getting murdered and then you have to figure out how to prevent your own murder.
01:43:22
Speaker
So you'll get murdered and then you'll go back like 30 minutes and you have 30 minutes of game time to figure out how to prevent that from happening. And then you get murdered again. um And, and, and there's, you know, these kinds of different branching paths and there's, I think four or five different endings.
01:43:38
Speaker
And so I remember we had a long, like 20 page thread on, adventure gamers about like how to get all the different endings and what was really going on and what's up with this random couple that are always trying. It was an open world kind game. And there are these two people on different street corners in every time period, like trying to find each other, but you could never just like tell them that you could never be like, Hey, your boyfriend's around the corner. Like it was so weird.
01:44:01
Speaker
Why, why couldn't you tell them? I think it was a metaphor for something. um it was It was bizarre, but there were there were these kind of story threads that you would only get if you played the whole thing, you know? And so there's characters who would refer to things that happened that you didn't see happen, then you saw them happen in another print branching path.
01:44:20
Speaker
So we would have like long conversations about that and what does this mean? It was just really a really interesting, you know, place to talk about games in almost like a kind of a critical discourse kind of way.
01:44:33
Speaker
Right. Right. And, you know, obviously also people were always talking about are Adventure Games really dead and like how much we hated old man Murray and who was the guy who said that Adventure Games were dead. I went there every day. it was a fun place to hang out. And it's kind of lost, you know, forums.
01:44:50
Speaker
It's a lost art. Yeah. Like the cutag forums, like you just go there and see who this group of people you you know are like what they're talking about today. And then you chime in. Are you still a forum user? Do you still freak with them? Where they exist.
01:45:05
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, there's not really many forums left. Right. So I'm not so much. And and honestly, like in the last 10, 15 years, I haven't been a huge member of the adventure game forums, the adventure gamers forums either.
01:45:19
Speaker
I went on to work in the game industry and to do PR for adventure games. And at some point it became like, okay, I do this for work already. I don't need to also spend all my leisure time talking about it. And...
01:45:30
Speaker
And did that career come out of yeah your connections on Adventure Gamers? Yeah, yeah, yeah it did. So so around 2004, I think, the editor of Adventure Gamers, his his name at the time was Evan Dickens.
01:45:43
Speaker
ah That's still his name, but that was he was the editor at the time. see um First, he brought me on as a moderator for the forums because I was always there and I was always like helping people. And then...
01:45:55
Speaker
I'm a writer and in my day job at that time I was writing um patient education materials. So like when you went to the doctor and you had genital warts or something, they were like, here, take this pamphlet. Like I wrote that. Like literally I wrote the one about genital warts.
01:46:07
Speaker
Nice. um Oh, you that but that was very helpful. Thank you. and the I'm the one. um So probably I talked, I probably complained about that on the forum about how like this is like I wanted to be ah writer for video games or whatever. And instead I'm writing these medical pamphlets.
01:46:25
Speaker
And um Evan asked if I would like to write for adventure gamers. And I was like, I don't know how to do that. Like I've never written a game review. Like what you yeah what do you think? I write about medical stuff. Yeah.
01:46:38
Speaker
So I kind of, I told him I was interested and then I just didn't respond to him for like two months. And he came back finally and he's like, what happened? I thought you you know i thought we were talking about this. And I was like, yeah, I'm kind of intimidated. I don't know how to do that, whatever. And yeah he's like, yeah, you'll be fine. Just try it.
01:46:53
Speaker
I think I was just nervous about the idea of reviewing games because I thought that my opinion somehow wasn't, and like I didn't know how to give an official opinion on something. Right. so um It is interesting, like before you start writing reviews, that you do think that reviewers maybe have this deep,
01:47:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's because something you don't about. Expertise, right. Yeah, yeah. And then you start writing them and you're like, oh, wait, no. Oh, wait, I can do this, yeah. So originally I was supposed to do like special projects. So my first few things that I wrote for them were like, I did an interview. The very first thing I did was an interview with the Chapman brothers, the creators of Strong Bad.
01:47:30
Speaker
Nice. They had just come out with something called Peasants Quest, which was- Yes! Browser-based, like, spoof on a Sierra game. Very good. So didn't interview with those guys. I did an article about, like, all the best Sierra fan sites that you could go to if you were kind of missing your Sierra fix.
01:47:46
Speaker
And then ah one of the early things I did that was really unusual was that I'd never played a LucasArts game before, and my... boyfriend and I were going on vacation on a houseboat. So I brought my laptop with me with the secret of monkey Island on it with the ah intention of playing the entire game on a boat without any access to the internet or hints anything that.
01:48:08
Speaker
um Yeah. So read an article about that. It was called in search of monkey Island. I wrote for them for, well, I started in in the summer of 2004 and then that fall, and then that fall um This was about, so I should i should back up. and Max Freelance Police was canceled in March of that year.
01:48:24
Speaker
And that was like a huge, everybody at Adventure Gamers, which skewed very much to LucasArts fans, like were just, like, this is the end. Like, there is never going to be another Adventure Game again.
01:48:37
Speaker
Like everything, we're going to burn it all down. This is like, this is this means like the final nail in the coffin. Yeah. Yeah. And then in October, Telltale started, or they announced that they had formed. So like the very first day that that happened, I still have it. I sent an email to them with my resume and i was like, hey, I live near you guys. I love adventure games. I'm a writer at Adventure Gamers. Like, do you want to hire me?
01:48:59
Speaker
And Dan Connors wrote back. He was the CEO and one of the founders. And he wrote back like 15 minutes later and he's like, we're not hiring right now, but keep in touch. And it's like, oh my God, like this is the coolest thing. So over the course of the next year and a half, um I met them at E3 with Adventure Gamers and interviewed them a couple of times. And in the spring of 2006, they had just got a funding run and they were ready to start hiring um a marketing team.
01:49:26
Speaker
And I had some marketing experience and I had writing experience and they were very interested in my experience at Adventure Gamers with the community and community building. ah So they brought me and also Jake Rodkin. They brought us into interview for the same job, which was awkward because we're actually talking on the adventure gamers private messages. That's how we used to communicate.
01:49:48
Speaker
i came home from work and like, Oh my God, Jake, they want me to come into an interview. And he's like, Oh my God, they want me to interview too. And then he said, Oh crap. Like they want us to interview for the same job. Like, Oh no. And in the end they liked us both. And so they kind of broke the job into two and hired both of us.
01:50:04
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah. So yeah, like literally without adventure gamers, I would not have gotten into the game industry probably. How long after that did you keep writing for adventure gamers? I continued for, um but i mean, the the most recent thing I did for them is 2022. So I i continued um for a long time. I was just doing like flashback articles. So we had a thing called flashback Friday where there would be a review of an old game that had never been reviewed before. So I did all of the King's Quest games as flashback articles. um
01:50:36
Speaker
I would review things on the DS because Telltale wasn't putting games out for the DS. So it was like, well, then that's not a conflict of interest. yeah And then after I left Telltale in 2009, I just went back to reviewing pretty much anything that seemed interesting to me.
01:50:51
Speaker
I do want to talk about that moment when Jack came on. Do you, you were already writing for the site. So do you remember We actually came on at the same time. Oh, I want to say that I was already um the moderator there, and Jack was in the was at the forums, and he actually was also on the um Game Boomers forums as well, so that might even be where I met him first.
01:51:13
Speaker
So we we started at the same time. And then Evan left about, and want to say not very long after that, a few months after that, and I remember Evan reaching out to me and saying... um I'm leaving and I'm going to make Jack the editor. And i basically, I think my title was senior writer at that time. I was basically, um i don't want to say I was Jack's right hand man. I don't know if he would call me that, but we we worked very closely before I started Telltale. We worked pretty closely, yeah especially at the beginning.
01:51:40
Speaker
Did you feel a shift in quality at all as... um and When Jack started? or Yeah, yeah, exactly. it's so It's hard to say because I wasn't there for that long under Evan.
01:51:54
Speaker
But I do think it... I mean, I do think, yes, I think Jack brought on some... you know it's It's hard to remember, but i remember things where there would be like, we were trying to figure out how do you integrate the forums more with the site. And we we there used to be a time where at the top of the forums, there would be like the headlines from the most recent articles would be posted up there.
01:52:13
Speaker
And I feel like those are the types of things that Jack brought on. And he he would be really professional with reaching out to developers and and having contacts there. And so it it definitely felt like working for kind of a professional outlet. I didn't have any frame of reference for that.
01:52:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it it felt like he knew what he do was doing and he like he really cared about it. And he always gave really good notes on his, you know, the The way we, I mean, Matt, you know, but the way we would, yeah we would do this is I would write a draft of an article.
01:52:46
Speaker
um i would send it to him and then he would send it back with red lines and and comments. And can you, you know, can you say more about this? or um you know, you seem to be contradicting this here, or I'm not sure how everything you've said here adds up to the pros and cons or the score that you came up with.
01:53:02
Speaker
um So I feel like he, he always gave really good comments. And this entire time, this was all volunteer on your part, right? yeah Yeah. It was always volunteer, yeah. For me. Right.
01:53:12
Speaker
Do you remember when Evo came on to the site? Yeah. I mean, I don't remember what year it was. I remember... Sure, sure. 2016 is when Merrick sold the site to Evo. Okay.
Management and Editorial Standards
01:53:26
Speaker
So, um you know, at that point, I don't think anything really changed. Merrick hadn't been... um very heavily involved for a long time. Merrick was very, was more involved when I started. Um, he used to come out for e three and, um, yeah, I've met Merrick a couple of times, which is considering he lives in Europe and I never went there.
01:53:47
Speaker
Like he came out, he came out a bunch times. yeah um ah Yeah, so when EVO started, i don't I didn't really notice a change in anything from my perspective, um just because i you know I think Merrick had been kind of hands off. I think there were probably changes as far as them trying to... like I remember there being conversations about how are we going to um raise money, you know,
01:54:13
Speaker
pursuing advertising, starting a Patreon, stuff like that, that I think probably um the Patreon specifically, I think was around the same time that Evo had come on.
01:54:25
Speaker
um But from my perspective yet, it hadn't really changed anything. You know, the only thing is he wasn't an editor. So after Jack left, i When I found out Jack was leaving, it was kind of like, well, well how's that going to work? Because right um the site had been kind of raised to this high editorial standard yeah um that it was like, well, you're getting rid of the guy who's kept it at that at that high standard, but you're not bringing in anyone to fill that hole.
01:54:50
Speaker
Right. um And just, you know, as a writer and an editor myself, I just knew that like these articles don't come out in their finished form. Yeah. From the beginning. and And so that and Jack also, um you know, he he had a very kind of structured way of running the site. He would have new content Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It was always Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
01:55:12
Speaker
And um ive that you know kind of went away. So there would be longer stretches of time where there wasn't an article. ah The news wasn't getting covered as promptly. And i mean, that was all I think just, I don't think it was because Evo like set out to do a bad job. I think of course these are all the things that Jack did as on a regular basis, but now there was nobody there to to do them or to oversee them.
01:55:34
Speaker
i I just thought it was a mistake. You know, i thought it was I thought it was too bad. After he'd been there for so long and he'd put so much into it. And I knew that Adventure Gamers was really, was him.
01:55:45
Speaker
That the site was the way it was because of him. um So I just it just, it just felt kind of like the end of an era. And actually at that time, I went and saved all of my articles as PDFs. Because had because i had a I don't know. I just kind of had a feeling that, that it wasn't going to be around forever.
01:56:05
Speaker
I, ended up having to do that after, you know, after the new owners, if, if I don't even know if that's a proper word for them, but, um, Once they took all the.
01:56:17
Speaker
The bylines. Yeah. Bylines down. I had to go through archive.org. Yeah. and And find, you know, all all the story all my stories with the bylines on them. Well, a lot of a lot of my articles aren't even there anymore. Yeah, that happened too.
01:56:31
Speaker
Yeah. Do you know, like, is that because they didn't want them there or just because it got messed up when they moved it to WordPress and they didn't care? think got messed up because we were talking to John Walker and he said when that conversion happened, lot of data, don't know it got, mean, is anything ever really deleted? But yeah, the forums went down, the bylines were erased. And it does, it sounds like it does have to do with the conversion to WordPress.
01:56:59
Speaker
Yeah, because I have several of like of my favorites um linked on my website as writing samples, and most of them just ah goes to a page now that has the headline and that's it.
01:57:10
Speaker
same My muck rack page is completely destroyed. Yeah. yeah Is that the next time that you really paid attention, paid attention to adventure gamers? no you know, so because of my PR work, you know, I had continued to send Evo right review copies, um kind of our most recent interaction with them. And you guys might be aware of this already was when old skies came out in April.
01:57:41
Speaker
um Dave Gilbert's most recent game. Right. um Roses, were you, did you do voice in that game? I did. played a Mix Mix. Okay. All right.
01:57:54
Speaker
um um So yeah, it's always it's always a very touchy thing when a website, when a review says something incorrect or something that the developer doesn't agree with.
01:58:04
Speaker
And usually I say, don't reach out to them. Like, let me handle it as the PR person because you don't want to get into a back and forth. And it's kind of easier for me to apologetically be like, hey, something you said wasn't quite right, whatever.
01:58:17
Speaker
um In this particular case, ah Dave read something in the review that was just not at all true. um That was kind of implying that the voice actors in the game were all amateurs that he that had worked for exposure, which is a very touchy thing to say.
01:58:34
Speaker
and and And not true and something that Dave took offense to. And so he um reached out to the author of the who knew who he knows it's um i'm gonna butcher his name but it was uh greg kustikian did i say that right who's an indie developer himself i don't know him so anyway he i i he had been writing for adventure gamers for a few months and uh he this he anyway he's he put that in his review and dave reached out to him and was like you know that's not really true um and it's kind of offensive to the voice actors and i'm wondering if you would
01:59:07
Speaker
correct it yeah and they they made a change like a very small change that really didn't change the meaning of it at all and uh dave and one or two of the voice actors kind of posted on social media and they were miffed by it so my reaction to that was ah my immediate reaction to that was this never would have happened under jack like jack never he wouldn't have let that that statement be in the review in the first place right You don't make an assumption about whether or not somebody paid their voice actors when when it's also very like well documented on the internet in Dave's social media and stuff that he pays his voice actors.
01:59:44
Speaker
um yeah So you don't make an assumption like that. And then if you get called on it, you fix it. you know yeah um So that to me, and i don't know like white women have you know I don't know exactly what conversation they had. I don't know you know, maybe it would have been different if I had reached out to Ivo. I have no idea.
02:00:02
Speaker
um But I felt like when that happened, it was like, oh, this is the fact that it happened at all was bad. The fact that it happened in a Adventure Gamers to me was almost like I took it personally because it was like this would never have that have happened on a deck. So the fact that that happened just about a month or two before the sale of the site, it was kind of like, oh, OK, well, and I guess that's over.
02:00:27
Speaker
but And then how did you how did you find out about the sale of the sale? found out on social media. I actually found out a little bit before that thing that I tweeted. um Yeah, that's where I found out. I found out from your tweet. Yeah, so so I guess a week or two...
02:00:45
Speaker
before the kind of the news started picking this up, the forums had disappeared and a forum member noticed that it had disappeared. And I i don't know, it was we retweeted. It wasn't someone I followed. It was retweeted by somebody and I noticed it and I was like, that's really weird. And so I went to the site and I saw that it was true.
02:01:02
Speaker
And i I'm on um Slack with with Jake Rodkin because we worked together on the Sam and Max remasters that came out recently. So I immediately went to him and I was like, oh my God, what's going on? And he's like, yeah, this this thing happened.
02:01:16
Speaker
And he already knew about it. um So it that was... I just, I don't even know. it just felt, I think the the loss of the forums was even ah bigger deal to me than the loss of the site. Because the site, yeah I saw the site going downhill.
02:01:34
Speaker
The forums, I thought were always going to be there. And I've i've been, um yeah I'm actually writing, working right now on a book about Telltale. And I've been spending lot of time on the adventure gamers forums, like using them to both to see how people react to things, but also just to piece together timelines and dates. So when things happened, um, so that, that, that's like a huge trove of information that I no longer have access to. And I'm like, I don't even know what I'm to Um, so that's how I found out about it. And then, um,
02:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, like a ah week later, i guess, there was an aftermath story about it. And then ah maybe later that day, John Walker's story on Kotaku. And then it was kind of, that was kind of amusing to me to see like real media picking up. like It's like, you don't you don't really know what something meant to people until it's gone. Like yeah this had always been kind of I would always say, you know, I write for adventure gamers or I have it on my resume or whatever. And I think it's like this silly little niche thing that maybe isn't respected.
02:02:38
Speaker
um And then you see people talking about it as like this venerable institution that's been around for 30 years. And you realize that like, oh, yeah, that there was something to that. That really was ah thing, even if it's a niche thing. Like that really was an important thing that just got completely thrown away in the trash. Yeah.
02:02:57
Speaker
And it's it's not that different than like when Sierra goes under and they're throwing these like original concept art and source things in a dumpster. It's like, it's exactly what happened.
02:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's wild. So, um yeah. um but So do you want to talk about, you know, the emotional aspect of this? How did you feel to to discover this? I was sad. i was really sad. And um I mean, that was, you know, i think that's why I immediately went to Jake and was like, can you believe that this happened? It's like, it's a piece of of um my 20s.
02:03:31
Speaker
You know, it's a piece of, yeah I want to want don't want to say my childhood, but it's ah it was a formative thing for my like young adulthood. Yeah. um It's also true that like, you know, I had, I had, I was gone from it for a while now. So it's not, it's, it's more just kind of like the disappointment of like, oh, everything that you, that you have, that's good at some time in your life at some point just is completely gone and you can't get it back.
Adventure Gamers' Lasting Impact
02:03:55
Speaker
And that's what it feels like. And, you know, for a long time, it was like, you could get it back by, you could still go there. yeah I could still look at the articles. I could still um look at the old forum posts and stuff. And it's like, you don't realize how much you miss that or you, how important it was to you until you don't have it anymore.
02:04:14
Speaker
yeah Yeah. So, and with everything else that's going on in the world right now, it just kind of feels like another, like, oh, that's another like good thing. That's just gone now. Yeah. Yeah. That's sad. It's sad. is sad.
02:04:24
Speaker
Well, Emily, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your time. I really appreciate it. You know, I think it's important that we get ah really a sense of what it felt like in its heyday and what what we've lost.
02:04:37
Speaker
but um And ah yeah. So where can people ah find you and cool stuff that you're doing? um I have a website, emilymorganti.com, where you'll mostly find actually dollhouses. I build dollhouses. What?
02:04:53
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's all right. You got to come back on and talk to us about your dollhouses. I have a Salmon Max room box there that I made. at the scale Salmon Max room box of their office. And um anyway, so that's... Are they for sale?
02:05:08
Speaker
No, I don't sell them. I i just hoard them. I have i just hoard yeah have dozens and dozens of dollhouses in my house. um And I'm also on Blue Sky. Nice. As Fuvlet is my username on Blue Sky.
02:05:21
Speaker
Awesome. And we'll link that in the show notes. Well, again, thank you so much for not only helping tell the story, but also talking about your feelings about it. Thank you. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.
02:05:32
Speaker
I'm excited to hear the rest of the episode.
02:05:53
Speaker
So how did you feel talking to Emily? Because that was quite nostalgic for me. ah Yeah, yeah. She pressed a lot of nostalgia buttons, um brought me back to what drew me to Adventure Gamers in the first place back in the day, right?
02:06:10
Speaker
But also, you know, there's something about in the things that Emily had to say, right? Like obviously it's sad, but a lot of friendships and working relationships had already come out of that site, right? Yeah, course. And a lot of people had already moved on to other venues of communication, right? And other ways of sharing their passion about this very niches type of video game. And so Even though Adventure Gamers was a very important part of establishing all that and keeping sort of the our passion for that genre alive during a very bleak time. it
02:06:52
Speaker
It birthed a lot. It birthed a lot of babies that are still alive and kicking. Yeah. And i also think, and I am going to go back to this a little bit because I think it is a good example. It really does remind me of things like when Blockbuster went down. Obviously when technology started changing, there was less need for video rental.
02:07:13
Speaker
ah But when the store finally went down, people reacted like they had always been going there. And I think that's really interesting in human behavior, right? Because i'm I hadn't been to Adventure Gamers in a while, in a long time. I'm i'm just going to be honest with you.
02:07:32
Speaker
Because people do move on. And so i'm it's it's interesting to me to see people who've probably moved on already ah get upset that something that maybe they weren't even active on ah get shut down. And that's just kind of the, I don't want to go hard news or anything, but that is kind of the nature of life, right? You you have to keep moving and keep moving on.
02:07:56
Speaker
But I did, I also felt that sense of sadness, right? Like even when I heard ah that Adventure Gamers was bought out and it's completely changed and riddled with gambling ads and potentially AI.
02:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, I was sad. I felt that same way. Like, oh, I go there all even though didn't. Because it is such an iconic thing that we lost and because there's a community tied to it.
02:08:21
Speaker
Right. I am not going to say something as condescending as it served its purpose already. Sure. Because I think it could have it was a website that people were still actively contributing to. So it yeah obviously could have done more and it could have done something cool and surprising at any moment, like any right like any venue ah where artists congregate could.
02:08:42
Speaker
or And unlike Blockbuster, what's really interesting about adventure gamers is adventure games are kind of back in this crazy popular way. This is actually the right time. I'm surprised it didn't go down way earlier.
02:08:56
Speaker
Right. You know, so, yeah, it's you're right. It could have done something very interesting because adventure games are very much alive right now. You're right, and it could have still been relevant, but it did create a lot of connections and other things that are still alive.
02:09:17
Speaker
And so it's not like the venue for those conversations and that those news and reviews are dead. There's other venues for that now were birthed from what was Adventure Gamers.
02:09:30
Speaker
was adventure gamers So, you know, this didn't... ClickOut Media didn't kill the adventure game scene. Not even talking about the forums at MixinMojo or the ah news and reviews at Adventure Game Hotspot.
02:09:48
Speaker
There are friendships, right, that built were built out of that that still exist today. ah today
02:10:06
Speaker
And so it's sad on a nostalgic level because it's something that was important to us is gone. And not just that it died, but that its ah corpse is hung up, bleeding and rotten in the town square for all of us to have to look at, right? Yeah. Yeah.
02:10:24
Speaker
It's like when you steal the mayor's ah statue and you in it's embarrassing in Stardew Valley and it's embarrassing and you put it in the town square and he's like, why did you do that? I hate everything. It's not like that. if you put his underwear. If you put his underwear in your Grange display.
02:10:42
Speaker
Or in the fucking soup, which again was the saddest thing I think I've ever... I was so legit sad that I did that. So many reg regrets, you guys. And it's sad from a preservation, you know, just a cultural preservation aspect is that those forums are gone. And... There is a chance that the archives of those forums will be hosted somewhere else. I write believe that is in the works. I don't know how any of that works, but I believe somehow it is happening. And a lot of the reviews that have been deleted or destroyed, some people have saved a lot of those. And there's plans in the works to get them up in other places.
02:11:26
Speaker
Right.
02:11:47
Speaker
it's It's just sad. And I think the bigger point here is the inshittification process. Yeah.
02:11:58
Speaker
To me, Rose, it is like there's two ways of living in the world. One... one Is the way me and you live it, right? Where we go out
Societal and Cultural Reflections
02:12:10
Speaker
and we... Chaotically? We go out, we spend time with ah our friends. We enjoy a tree. we and We play a game because we like it. We play, we talk to ah ah people on the internet about how we like the TV show, right?
02:12:26
Speaker
Yes. And then there's this other way of living life that is like, how is, can I make more money?
02:12:38
Speaker
By cutting down that tree or by leaving that tree up and charging people to go near the tree or yeah by leaving the tree up and then people will buy the building nearby because they like the tree.
02:12:49
Speaker
um And it it feels like So many things, even like cereals switching from ah but from oat flour to corn flour, right, is yeah an example of this video game consoles coming out and using shittier plastic.
02:13:09
Speaker
Yeah. So it feels, so like a handheld video game console feels worse in your hands than it used to. Right. um Yeah. All the cutting corners that that businesses do, you know?
02:13:20
Speaker
This new AI revolution. Oh my God, it's driving me nuts, especially as an artist. ah You don't want to open that can of worms. That can of worms is full of angry rats.
02:13:33
Speaker
And these Phoenixio people, these open, or these ah click out Media people are people who live the in the world that second way, where yeah it is just, they're just, they're they're not, they're just looking around at everything as opportunities for exploitation, right? yeah um They're looking and every ah item and every experience and every person as a possible revenue stream that can be optimized.
02:14:02
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think we are the type of people, and obviously there's different types of people in the world. um You know, not everyone is like this, but think we're the type of people where, at least for me, success for the day is like I saw a cool flower.
02:14:19
Speaker
ah One of my partners described me as such as that I'm just really happy and excited to be in the world that I'm in.
02:14:31
Speaker
And thus, I will walk by every flower and be like, look at this fucking flower. It's so pretty and it smells good. Isn't that amazing? Where you know some people define success as how much money did I make today?
02:14:45
Speaker
Right. And it's sad. And I know we all have to make money. We're all there. We can't control the the rest of a capitalistic society. But I guess we can control...
02:14:58
Speaker
where we put our money and our energy and what we prioritize. i I would say that that is true, right? And I think that is what we have to do. um But i I also think that on some level, not to not to be too fatalist about that, but on some level, it's being taken out of our hands, right?
02:15:22
Speaker
I mean, this is something that um So Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer talked about um back in you know early 20th century, mid 20th century.
02:15:34
Speaker
um They're sociological theorists that talked that started. Talking about what would eventually be known as late stage capitalism um in the writings is this, the, um the idea that instrumental reason can be like a form of domination, right? Because if you use, if you apply reason to all things, right?
02:15:57
Speaker
um you're going to end up looking for, you're going to end up finding inefficiencies and trying to conquer those inefficiencies, right? Right. um So you're going to look at ways to boil down things like the human experience.
02:16:12
Speaker
Right. The things that we need into their most basic things. components and deliver those in the most basic and efficient ways possible. And one thing you lose there, not only do you lose critical thinking skills and problem solving skills um in your average person, because that's being taken away from us because it's inefficient to have us as humans encounter friction, right?
02:16:37
Speaker
ah The other thing you're getting is social control. There are certain people who control everything And they tailor the culture towards those ends.
02:16:50
Speaker
And I feel like that is that is the sort of thing that's happening here with the insidification of the world, right? um And it's happening specifically in the culture industry, right? Like you you mentioned um TV shows just ditching properties, right?
02:17:08
Speaker
yeah. Because, oh, you know what's more efficient than allowing people to enjoy? yeah ah what's ah What's a Netflix series that was good that got killed?
02:17:19
Speaker
Oh, Glow. Yeah. Rather than letting people enjoy Glow and then saying Netflix rules because they put it they they have this show called Glow, um they realize, okay, well, the people that will lose by getting rid of Glow are negligible compared to the amount that will save on the budget of Glow plus the amount of tax revenue we'll save.
02:17:42
Speaker
Right. By um divesting of a specific property. And what you end up having is this like hollowing out of culture and human experience to make money for these very specific groups.
02:17:59
Speaker
Yeah. And that is... precisely what is happening here. There was something something that people enjoyed and something that was there as a beloved artifact. and somebody decided, oh, we can make a little bit of money by destroying this thing. So let's just buy it, destroy it.
02:18:20
Speaker
We'll make our little bit of money and people will be mad at us. yeah But who cares? What a soulless way to do anything. Right. I mean, that's that's exactly it, right? That is the heart of social control is yeah um its enemy is soul.
02:18:41
Speaker
It's so sad. That's art is a form of resistance. Happiness is a form of resistance. Granted, those code can't do anything by themselves. You also need legitimate resistance.
02:18:52
Speaker
but Yes, yes. But those things are forms of resistance. They they they have to coexist with protests and um social programs and legal challenges and political reform.
02:19:10
Speaker
Wow. has to coexist with joy and art because joy and art are the opposite of what creates social control. Right. And you you had said something off recording. We were off recording. We were just chit-chatting.
02:19:24
Speaker
um And you had said that you know art is important to absorb because that's how we learn and and how we know what's going on and how we feel and how we process emotions. So to see art and creations and writing and thoughts being just flippantly – destroyed is so terrible. It's so terrible to think about That's why I think, you know, journalism and ah reviews and things like that. That's one of the reasons I think they're important is even if even if there are more efficient ways of getting those things now, it is important to have people's perspectives out there that you can read and learn from.
02:20:07
Speaker
um yeah It can give you new insights into things that you didn't think of.
02:20:15
Speaker
Hey, do you want to know something? I'm an artist.
02:20:20
Speaker
Oh, just wanted to put that out there. wasn't sure if the people knew. didn't know that. and I, yeah, I try to say things with my art. That's, that's very, a rudimentary way to say that, but that is how I use my art. Yeah.
02:20:36
Speaker
know if you knew that. I didn't know that. And I don't think the listeners knew that. So I'm glad that you taught everybody. What's the, what's the most recent art that you made?
Art, Economics, and AI Discussion
02:20:44
Speaker
I made a sculpture today in my private sculptor sculpture lesson. you want to tell everyone what your sculpture was sculpture was of a face.
02:20:56
Speaker
But what I really want to do is the reason I'm learning how to do faces is because I want to start bringing awareness and making statements about having body dysmorphic disorder. I already do that a little bit yeah in my pieces, and especially my illustrative pieces to bring awareness, show people what it might feel like.
02:21:14
Speaker
I want to bring sculpture to that. So i I not only want to make limbs and body parts, I want to twist them and contort them and give you a view of what I'm thinking about and what I might see. um And in my experience, expressing that has helped a lot of people in my community.
02:21:32
Speaker
um I was diagnosed with BDD and I didn't know it was a thing. I didn't know I had it until I saw somebody else talk about it online. And I think art is important, ah important for that.
02:21:45
Speaker
Yeah.
02:21:47
Speaker
Another thing I made was It's on my Instagram. you can go check it out. It is a very... Violent looking ah crystal painting. It looks very sharp and and violent, but beautiful at the same time, which is kind of a lot of the, a lot of themes I like to explore, you know, in my, in my artwork.
02:22:07
Speaker
It's sort of pretty, but it's also not because I want people to be able to appreciate almost ugly, aggressive looking things. I want people to think about that, you know?
02:22:20
Speaker
So we should probably wrap up here. What are your clothes closing thoughts out about this this whole thing? Well, think what I've taken away from it it is obviously it is not a black and white situation.
02:22:35
Speaker
There's a lot of gray areas, especially when you're when a lot of people are involved and there's multiple stories to think about. um But honestly, i think I'm just taking away that
02:22:49
Speaker
I mean, it's hard news, right? But it's it's making me value things that we do have. And i think I think Emily's part of the interview really hit home because this is how we made a lot of our online friendships and a community that likes to talk about adventure games. And I don't you know i don't know if I took away anything ah poignant, right?
02:23:11
Speaker
Other than I'm glad that I got to see other perspectives on why and how this could happen and how how powerful nostalgia can be for people. um But mostly it's just sad.
02:23:24
Speaker
Mostly it's just shitty see something that could have been even greater in a time for adventure games ah get treated like it was nothing. you know Yeah, i i think it's important that we saw... um you know ah the two different sides of that, right? That there yeah there is this hollow, soulless side of, ah you know, of course this makes sense to them to do. Of course it makes sense to for them to buy a 25-year-old website to get their SEO up. Of course it makes sense
02:24:00
Speaker
that they don't care about what that, about what the ways that that would upset people. Of course, it doesn't matter to them that it's going to kill a website and that they'll just, they've already made their money back. They'll get rid of it.
02:24:15
Speaker
Right. hi To see that side of it. And then to see the other side of like, yeah, this was a place that I met my friends. Right. Like this is like this again, it just, I think it just speaks to um again, this idea of this hollowing out of the United States, right? This cracking open, like we are we are getting, not even the United States, the world, the the the the culture, right?
02:24:45
Speaker
We are getting to this place where, man, and people have stripped the meat off the bones and now they're cracking it out and, ah you know, scraping the marrow out, right? Like we are This is what people mean when they say late stage capitalism. It's not just a buzzword. it is this idea of when capitalism has consumed everything, it's going to.
02:25:11
Speaker
The more capitalism consumes, the more it wants to consume, the more it's going to then need to consume. And um it goes from, you know, it goes from something as big as ruining health care.
02:25:24
Speaker
All the way down to ruining your favorite adventure game website. Because it has to. Everybody has to provide more profits this quarter than they did last quarter.
02:25:34
Speaker
And even even on a smaller scale, right? Even in a personal scale, we're always aiming to make more money because money is is always... Prices for things are constantly going up. So even as a personal pressure, we're always expected to make more all the time.
02:25:54
Speaker
Which is a so a thing that I think is interesting that we've been talking about a lot on this podcast in this past year. A lot of people have been making games about, right? We talked about that um when we talked about um Wanderstop.
02:26:08
Speaker
Yeah, Wanderstop. Yep. and We've talked about that a couple other times this year. It seems like this is... a thing that is manifesting in a bunch of different ways and a lot of people are feeling it and having and expressing themselves about it. and they yeah I think these are thoughts and ideas we should hold on to because at some point We're going to need to rebuild things in a way that we are happy with. Yeah.
02:26:38
Speaker
And interestingly, this happening is also it's um it's almost like a it's almost something you could put in a time capsule. ah It's exactly where we are with, um you know, dealing with AI and gambling ads all over the place. And oh it is an interesting time, isn't it AI is critical theory in fast forward, right? That is literally its whole deal is yeah how do I make everything as efficient as possible?
02:27:05
Speaker
I don't need to have a soul. All I need to have is exactly the bare minimum of what yeah I think you need from me. Did you ever play that game Universal Paperclips? No, no.
02:27:17
Speaker
Maybe this is a good place to end on. um Okay. There is a game. It's one of those. Did you ever play one of those idle clicker games? Yes. Like cookie clicker is another good example. I was just going to say, yeah, cookie clicker I'm very familiar with. Yeah, I like clicking games for the most part.
02:27:32
Speaker
So um Universal Paperclips is a game you can go play right now. Just Google it um and you can find it. It's free. And you start with a ah you play a basically an ai Who is making a paperclip. Like the first thing you do is you click a button that says make paperclips.
02:27:53
Speaker
Right. And after a certain amount of paperclips, you get the money to make auto clipper that makes paperclips for you. As time goes on, ah as you make more and more and more paperclips.
02:28:08
Speaker
the demand for paperclips rises. So you have to make more paperclips. And so you make more auto clippers and then you make factories that make paperclips. And then you have to ah make these, ah you know, drones that scrounge for wire because you're running out of wire to make paperclips.
02:28:24
Speaker
Right. And then you end up where suddenly something pops up on the screen where it's like, have to earn this new currency, which is trust. And you're like, oh, that's weird.
02:28:36
Speaker
And then you realize you are earning trust of the people so that you can better manipulate. You can spend that trust to better manipulate the market.
02:28:48
Speaker
And then you're using the money you get to manipulate the market to better make paper clips and to get more auto clippers Until you end up having to leave the earth because you've made the entire earth into paperclips.
02:29:05
Speaker
And you end up expanding throughout the universe and sending... um drones out to scour the universe for material with which you can make paperclips and some of the drones then go the ai drones go rogue and so you have to spend money on weaponry to fight the rogue drones so that you can better make paperclips and what it's telling us is that if you are focused only on If you are an AI focused only on making paperclips, you are going to put every effort into finding the most efficient way to make as many paperclips as you possibly can, and nothing else matters.
02:29:47
Speaker
does It doesn't matter who uses the paperclips. It doesn't matter what the paperclips, what function the paperclips are using. It's just about making paperclips, man. So if there's no humans left, because they've all been turned into fucking paperclips.
02:30:03
Speaker
Ha ha ha! It doesn't matter. They weren't necessary. It wasn't necessary to have humans for you to make paperclips. They have at some point ended up getting in your way.
02:30:15
Speaker
Right. It's a really good game. I want to play that. That sounds incredible. yeah It takes, you can probably get it done in a few hours.
02:30:27
Speaker
yeah um And it's just text and buttons on a screen. I'm playing it right now. I'm just clicking the make paperclip button. Nice. I like it. I like that a lot. Yeah.
02:30:38
Speaker
So anyway, well, we went hard news for a while, but I do enjoy, i mean, we do deep dives and serious nature topics on this pod.
02:30:52
Speaker
Uh, so hopefully people will, will take something away from our thoughts and our interviews. Yeah, I hope so too. And, um, Yeah, if you guys have thoughts, feel free to send us an email, mattandroses at gmail.com.
02:31:05
Speaker
um If you liked this show, leave us you know reviews and share with your friends. um I'm sorry we told you all we would have a video game to review this episode, but then something happened. But then this happened. and Yeah, that happens. We couldn't ignore it. In the entertainment world, you know?
02:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, it was important to us and we so we couldn't just ignore it. So um I will renew that promise and we'll be back in, i think, two weeks um and we'll be talking about a game.
02:31:37
Speaker
ah You can find us on Instagram at Save Your Game Podcast.
Creative Sharing and Art as Expression
02:31:41
Speaker
We throw updates on there. Sometimes I'll draw a little cute little something ah for our Instagram. And if you want to see my aforementioned art, that's PushingUpRoses on Instagram. You'll find it.
02:31:52
Speaker
Just Google it. You'll find it. tell You'll find it. ah Don't Google too hard. Don't look too deep now. Don't Google too hard. it's it's It's a dangerous world out there.
02:32:03
Speaker
miss yeah Just trying to protect you, okay? So I think i I actually do have one more observation, and I don't exactly know how to say it to you because I don't know if it's going to hurt your feelings. I don't know if it's going to...
02:32:18
Speaker
affect our relationship. So, well, I'm not afraid of emotions. So hit me. All right. Well, I think podcast is art, Matt. That's so so profound and important because i think art is suffer.
02:32:35
Speaker
You're so right.