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Interview with Jeremy Patenaude, the Author of Halo: Empty Throne
2 Plays5 months ago
We got to sit down with Jeremy Patenaude to talk about his career and his new novel, Halo: Empty Throne! Note: we interviewed him before we read the book.
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Synopsis2559. It has been a year since the rogue artificial intelligence Cortana seized control of the Domain, an otherworldly dimension housing a vast information network. With an array of Forerunner weapons at her disposal, Cortana set out to enforce an authoritarian peace on the civilizations of the galaxy. But as the United Nations Space Command flagship Infinity prepares to strike against Cortana at Zeta Halo, another plan has also been set in motion.
An ancient access point hidden on a seemingly insignificant human colony has become the focus of a parallel effort to claim the Domain and its immeasurable capabilities. The UNSC, however, needs a key: a living, forsaken product of an old war. As a new generation of heroes rise to meet this challenge and Cortana's pursuit of control reaches a desperate and sudden crescendo, a cunning, ruthless warrior emerges from the shadows of the Banished, who has vowed to fill the new power vacuum by any means necessary...
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Transcript
Introduction and Jeremy's Book
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah, you can't force me.
00:00:01
Speaker
I have the perfect excuse to not come out.
00:00:03
Speaker
What are you trying to get me killed?
00:00:05
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:00:07
Speaker
You're trying to kill me?
00:00:09
Speaker
Jeremy, thank you so much for being on the show.
00:00:11
Speaker
Nice to meet you.
00:00:12
Speaker
That's a good one to start.
00:00:15
Speaker
That's a good way to start.
00:00:16
Speaker
We, we, it's just being fully transparent.
00:00:20
Speaker
Phil and I got the book on Wednesday and I threatened Tim with, I am going to read the entire thing before we talk to Jeremy on Friday.
00:00:30
Speaker
He's a big boy.
00:00:31
Speaker
And then I saw it was 500 pages and I said, no, that's not happening.
00:00:37
Speaker
I was so intimidated by the size of the book that I read the first few pages at least.
00:00:43
Speaker
Love the fact that you have a flashback to kick it off with with John landing on Halo for the very first time.
00:00:54
Speaker
So, Jeremy, I guess our first question is, what are your first experiences with Halo?
00:01:01
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:01:03
Speaker
So I think my introduction with Halo was Converse.
00:01:06
Speaker
Well, no, actually, it wasn't even this.
00:01:09
Speaker
I knew that Microsoft was coming out with an Xbox like late.
00:01:14
Speaker
Late 90s, 2000s, I had heard about it.
00:01:17
Speaker
And in 2001, during the I was actually Xbox was being released alongside Nintendo's GameCube in late 2001.
00:01:28
Speaker
And I was going to, I was a Nintendo fanboy for the 80s and 90s.
00:01:32
Speaker
I mean, that was my cup of tea.
00:01:34
Speaker
And I was going to buy, like pre-order a GameCube at an FYE in a mall.
00:01:41
Speaker
And as I was going through the mall to the FYE, where I was going to do my pre-order, I passed an electronic boutique and I saw a game that was on display there.
00:01:50
Speaker
And it was Halo.
00:01:51
Speaker
It was a demo of Halo.
00:01:53
Speaker
And it was the first time I'd ever grabbed, you know, the Duke Xbox controller.
00:01:59
Speaker
First time I'd ever seen anything quite like it.
00:02:01
Speaker
I think the closest connection that I had with it on a console was like Goldeneye for the 64.
00:02:11
Speaker
And so I played about 15 minutes there in the EB and then I went over to, I should have made the pre-order there at the EB that I was at, but I went over to the FYE and said, I had initially made plans for a GameCube.
00:02:23
Speaker
I'm going to switch it over to the X-Men.
00:02:25
Speaker
And so what I did was I ended up
00:02:27
Speaker
getting the game at launch, playing it like crazy for the first year or two.
00:02:32
Speaker
And I think after the Halo 2 announced trailer, which was, I want to say sometime in 2002 or something, and then the E3 2003 campaign demo, I really started getting intrigued about the story and kind of just jumped feet first there.
00:02:48
Speaker
I'd read The Fall of Reach, I think, at some point earlier on.
00:02:52
Speaker
That's Eric Nyland's book.
00:02:54
Speaker
And the first book that really actually launched the kind of the
00:02:58
Speaker
literary side of the franchise.
00:03:01
Speaker
And so that's my introduction into it.
00:03:04
Speaker
In 2009, I got the opportunity to come on board and work on the franchise team there and was part of the franchise team for almost 14 years.
00:03:14
Speaker
And this project was kind of at the tail end of that.
00:03:18
Speaker
And I transitioned off the team early 2023.
Joining Halo Franchise and Story Bible
00:03:24
Speaker
And so worked on the book there and the rest is history.
00:03:29
Speaker
Wow.
00:03:31
Speaker
When it comes to that level of involvement, you know, we work with a lot of right for hire kind of people, you know, and so having someone who was that closely involved, I'm very curious.
00:03:46
Speaker
What's the Bible for this thing like?
00:03:48
Speaker
I imagine how in depth does it actually get?
00:03:53
Speaker
Because we've read a lot of the Halo books and it's
00:03:56
Speaker
already pretty crazy how much specific work is in there.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:01
Speaker
So when I came on board in 2009, we had an on-hand Bible that was made prior to me coming into the studio.
00:04:10
Speaker
Bungie had their own Bible.
00:04:12
Speaker
We grafted some of that into a story Bible early on.
00:04:17
Speaker
I came on, like I said, 2009.
00:04:18
Speaker
So before it was even called
00:04:22
Speaker
343 Industries.
00:04:24
Speaker
I was in, the team was about, I want to say 20 people, 25 people.
00:04:31
Speaker
Uh, early on, I was more involved in the community side, but, uh, I, I kind of moved over to the franchise team, which was the beating heart at Frank O'Connor, Kevin Grace, uh, Corinne Robinson.
00:04:43
Speaker
Uh, it was the beating heart of storytelling outside of the game sphere.
00:04:47
Speaker
So they would, they would speak into the game.
00:04:49
Speaker
Um, but they would basically were managing, you know, the projects that were, uh, uh, licensed products like the Simon Schuster, uh, tour at the time.
00:04:59
Speaker
And, um,
00:05:00
Speaker
and Dark Horse and stuff like that.
00:05:01
Speaker
So anything that was outside of the framework of the game space was really being managed by that team.
00:05:08
Speaker
and we developed the bible kept on adding to it eventually it became sort of like an internal wiki and um around so when i came on board we released a an encyclopedia uh i think it was late 2009. uh i was not thrilled about it i came on kind of as they were as it was you know coming off the presses so to speak i mean i was involved at some level and
00:05:32
Speaker
you know, trying to do various things with it.
00:05:34
Speaker
But, but basically I was, it was more of a hands off thing for me.
00:05:37
Speaker
So since the first day I was there, I really wanted to see a larger, broader swath of the actual story Bible that we had internally.
00:05:47
Speaker
Um,
00:05:49
Speaker
put out there for the fans to read.
00:05:51
Speaker
And so over the years, I've made cases for us to do an encyclopedia, consumer products, which shoot it down because it's a big project.
00:06:03
Speaker
But in, I want to say 2000, yeah, so right around COVID, this was my
00:06:09
Speaker
My COVID project was basically gathering a bunch of materials for the story Bible and spearheading that.
00:06:17
Speaker
And I led a team of two or three writers.
00:06:20
Speaker
So Jeff Easterling and Kenneth Peters worked with Steven Loftus, one of the guys from the community.
00:06:27
Speaker
And we compiled and reviewed and edited tons of material.
00:06:36
Speaker
that when I joined the team, the story Bible was, you know, a few hundred pages, um,
00:06:41
Speaker
It was a wiki site internally when I left, filled with hundreds of entries, each of them having thousands and thousands of words.
00:06:53
Speaker
Because we had published so much material between the two timeframes.
00:06:57
Speaker
And when I came on board, we were releasing two to three books a year.
00:07:01
Speaker
And so you can imagine the large volume of stuff that basically is being put out there between the time that I came on board and
00:07:09
Speaker
And when we published, so in 2022, we published the Halo Encyclopedia, basically, that is in essence the story Bible up to about 2020.
00:07:22
Speaker
I think they could add a good bit to it now, but the fans have...
00:07:30
Speaker
really a large part of the story Bible in their possession.
00:07:34
Speaker
Now, if they get the encyclopedia, they'll see kind of the crib notes for the Halo universe and as far as we could give them, you know, to the public.
00:07:44
Speaker
When you're writing, when you're writing stuff for within the Halo franchise in this book, what is the, I'm always curious, what is, how are, how is lore handled internally where,
00:07:59
Speaker
lore or Bible material where you have it like, is there like a precedent given to certain things over other things where it's like, oh, I would really like to tackle this from a slightly different angle or change this detail slightly.
00:08:13
Speaker
Like it was mentioned in this in this one book on page 236 that it's this.
00:08:18
Speaker
But now we can do something really cool if it's not that.
00:08:22
Speaker
Like, is there, is there any internal debate about that?
00:08:25
Speaker
Or do you just have to work within previous worked as like, this is just the facts as they are.
00:08:32
Speaker
And we move forward, uh, building those.
00:08:35
Speaker
I want to say mostly the second thing you said now, um,
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, this is probably a better question for the folks on the team still.
00:08:44
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:08:46
Speaker
I don't want to put them in any difficult situation, but I will say this, like while I was there, you know, the conversation comes up where you'll have two pieces of material that have already been published.
00:08:58
Speaker
Even as I say this, people who are familiar with the Halo universe are going to know specific ones that are probably coming to mind where they're contradictory.
00:09:08
Speaker
They don't fit together easily.
00:09:10
Speaker
It could be because there was two different publishing groups.
00:09:12
Speaker
Maybe it was a book that came out at a certain point in time and a game that came out later or something to that effect.
00:09:18
Speaker
And for whatever the reason it is, they don't line up as neatly as...
00:09:25
Speaker
as we would like them to, if there was one person or one group of people that were kind of orchestrating all of it.
00:09:33
Speaker
So you have a lot of moving parts when you're doing things in parallel.
00:09:36
Speaker
You have a lot of moving parts when you're bringing new people on board to develop new stories in the universe.
00:09:43
Speaker
When we had issues where there was friction between two
00:09:48
Speaker
two medias, whether it was a game or a book or comic or whatever, what we would do is we would try to find the mitigating reality, the path that we could have between the two and dovetail them as best that we can.
00:10:01
Speaker
In some situations, it's not an actual issue the fans are picking up on.
00:10:05
Speaker
Sometimes it's a perceived issue, but if they had the full sort of download, they would understand we actually have plans to fill in those.
00:10:12
Speaker
those areas.
00:10:14
Speaker
But we know that the fans of the Halo universe love details and they love to make sure that all the dots connect.
00:10:23
Speaker
And so what we'd often do is we would make sure that we went in there.
00:10:26
Speaker
Sometimes we refer to it, this is not very elegant, but as spackling cracks in the universe.
00:10:32
Speaker
And we would spackle it the best we could with the materials we had and try to rationalize two things that maybe we didn't have
00:10:40
Speaker
a say in one of them, or there was elements that needed to be fit together a little bit more nicely and fine-tuned.
00:10:48
Speaker
So we'd go in there and work through it.
00:10:50
Speaker
But yeah, that's essentially how we'd handle it then.
00:10:54
Speaker
They may have other processes now that are more uniform, but I think that's pretty much how most franchises deal with things that come in.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, and Games Workshop just says, ah, it's the warp.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:09
Speaker
I would love that get on a DL3 card.
00:11:14
Speaker
One thing about Halo is that we have a lot of continuity between different things, and we tried really hard to keep all of it in the same frame instead of building out multiverses or have a warp situation where we can just wash it over.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:28
Speaker
Right.
00:11:29
Speaker
Now, is my research correct in that, is this your first novel within the Halo universe?
Creating the First Halo Novel
00:11:36
Speaker
This is my first novel.
00:11:37
Speaker
I started working closely with the authors.
00:11:40
Speaker
So I've seen you guys have had Troy and maybe Kelly and some of the other authors on there.
00:11:44
Speaker
Those fantastic people.
00:11:46
Speaker
And I worked closely with them, kind of leading the publishing effort.
00:11:51
Speaker
We had other people on the team that were helping out with, but that was really kind of, that was my corner of the universe that I really loved.
00:11:58
Speaker
And so I'd work with Troy and Kelly and I started back with Greg Baer and Karen Travis way back in the day.
00:12:05
Speaker
Nice.
00:12:08
Speaker
And yeah, so, I mean, during that process, I had my hands involved in the books, but wasn't really spending a lot of time writing the actual prose.
00:12:19
Speaker
Sure.
00:12:20
Speaker
There were short stories that I wrote, but this is the first kind of full-length novel.
00:12:25
Speaker
I worked on guides and encyclopedias and stuff like that.
00:12:28
Speaker
This is the first novel.
00:12:30
Speaker
So what was the process of developing this?
00:12:33
Speaker
Was there something that you guys knew you wanted to hit or was this more of a pitch, a passion project?
00:12:40
Speaker
How did that go about?
00:12:42
Speaker
Well, there's definitely some passion elements in there.
00:12:45
Speaker
The main story thread is something that I kind of developed way back when I first joined the team and was working with Eric Nyland.
00:12:52
Speaker
He was writing the Halsey Journal for Halo Reach, the
00:12:57
Speaker
the legendary edition or whatever of halo region so we love eric yeah yeah he's great um and you know as he was writing it one of these ideas came into my head uh which i won't get into because it's a plot element in the story but the main thread of the story i think um surrounding the two characters that are on the cover um is something that came to me back then and i kind of worked and developed on it on it a little bit in the 2014 2015. um so that element is passion really this novel kind of was born out of
00:13:28
Speaker
a desire from some folks on our publishing team, our consumer products team, to get fans up to speed.
00:13:39
Speaker
We had 20 years of lore and it was kind of exponentially growing because we would have more and more content added each year by several orders of magnitude.
00:13:50
Speaker
So it wasn't just one game came out.
00:13:52
Speaker
It was a game, three books, a comic series,
00:13:56
Speaker
And so how would we get those folks up to speed?
00:14:01
Speaker
Could we create a one-stop shop that would allow someone new to the universe that maybe is playing Halo Infinite for the first time?
00:14:09
Speaker
Because this is really the impetus behind it.
00:14:11
Speaker
We had just released Infinite.
00:14:12
Speaker
Lots of new people came on board to check out the game.
00:14:15
Speaker
And so they wanted to get something published that would basically gather up all those threads.
00:14:21
Speaker
And initially we had talked about this being something that we would work with one of the existing external authors.
00:14:28
Speaker
But I was like, this is so fraught with
00:14:32
Speaker
terrible consequences that uh let's see what we can do in-house and so i started kind of pulling together an outline in-house there's so many different yeah you know elements that are you know very very narrow threading of the needle sure four or five different concepts so we built the outline and then
00:14:51
Speaker
I kind of ended up with the project.
00:14:53
Speaker
I felt like I could work on this and it happened to be the project that I was working on when I left and I finished it up after I left.
00:15:02
Speaker
And yeah, that's the story.
00:15:04
Speaker
Nice.
00:15:05
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:15:06
Speaker
Yeah, you're actually the...
00:15:08
Speaker
fourth uh halo author we've spoken with the first one was uh was bill deets uh oh yeah uh who you know wrote wrote the the wrote the halo the act the literal halo adaptation in 2003 uh yeah
00:15:28
Speaker
And that right there was a very challenging process.
00:15:31
Speaker
Like, what do you include?
00:15:32
Speaker
What do you not include?
00:15:34
Speaker
Before my time.
00:15:35
Speaker
But yeah, it definitely was a huge, huge undertaking.
00:15:39
Speaker
Learning a lot of that stuff on the fly, as it were.
00:15:44
Speaker
And I can only imagine that one of the things that you mentioned earlier, conflicting media.
00:15:51
Speaker
For example, the fall of Reach, the book, versus the game Halo Reach.
00:15:58
Speaker
I've seen a lot of people.
00:15:59
Speaker
You said it.
00:16:01
Speaker
I said, I can say it.
00:16:05
Speaker
But I've seen a lot of people kind of work it out, like in their head, like, okay, this is how the two things can kind of exist in the same space.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:13
Speaker
I mean, that was one thing that I was very passionate about while I was there, to be perfectly honest, because Reach was being released the year after I first joined the team.
00:16:23
Speaker
Sure.
00:16:23
Speaker
And yeah, I wanted to make sure that those pieces connected and fit.
00:16:30
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah that's fine um so within the entire uh franchise uh what is your favorite uh what's your single favorite piece of media that isn't this book you're not you're this is this is not my favorite um even though i'm very fun oh what's your single favorite piece of halo media
00:16:57
Speaker
All right, I'm going to give you two because I think it'll kind of give you the full scope.
00:17:04
Speaker
So Halo 1 was the game that I fell in love with.
00:17:07
Speaker
I love a lot of things about 2 and 3 and the games that followed them, but 1 will always have a very warm place in my heart because of the early years with the franchise when it was...
00:17:20
Speaker
know it wasn't where it is now um and uh and so i love halo one um and um i would say uh joseph staton's um halo contact harvest which was a novel that came out um i think shortly before uh halo three uh maybe a year or two before halo three and um
00:17:41
Speaker
One of the things I really tried to do on the team while I was there was really work on building the universe out, fleshing out the characters, the worlds, the organizations.
00:17:53
Speaker
The pet project of the franchise team was developing that
00:17:56
Speaker
that internal wiki that I told you about.
00:18:01
Speaker
And so he did more, because he was an internal writer, he was a Bungie employee at the time.
00:18:06
Speaker
He had spearheaded Halo.
00:18:08
Speaker
Halo was kind of his baby with a bunch of other folks from Bungie.
00:18:12
Speaker
And so he had kind of a deeper cut in his novel
00:18:18
Speaker
on the lore because it was the year that he breathed.
00:18:22
Speaker
And so for me personally, that's what I wanted to bring to Empty Throne was something similar to that, something that kind of echoed that.
00:18:30
Speaker
I don't know how successful I was, I'll leave to the readers to determine, but world building, character building, setting up stuff for future stories, building up threads that could be used as launch pads to tell different stories.
00:18:43
Speaker
That's what I really wanted to do with Empty Throne.
00:18:45
Speaker
I think that's what that's what Staten did essentially with Contact Harvest.
00:18:49
Speaker
Nice.
00:18:51
Speaker
When it comes to to take it back a little bit to just broaden the horizons here, obviously, you also have for well over a decade where eat breathing and sleeping Halo.
Inspirations and Writing Philosophy
00:19:04
Speaker
But none of these franchises exist in a bubble.
00:19:06
Speaker
What are some of the inspirations that you took into the creation of this book and your work in general?
00:19:15
Speaker
I mean, my biggest inspiration driving me, to be perfectly honest, with this book and with how it was influenced is really the previous Halo authors.
00:19:25
Speaker
I mean, like I said, I love world building.
00:19:29
Speaker
So you can imagine Tolkien is a huge hero of mine.
00:19:34
Speaker
And The Silmarillion is my favorite book.
00:19:36
Speaker
So right there, it's his world-building book.
00:19:39
Speaker
And it's my favorite, I would say, prose novel.
00:19:44
Speaker
I'm a big fan of C.S.
00:19:45
Speaker
Lewis and his Space Trilogy.
00:19:49
Speaker
And I think those are always influences in anything that I work on.
00:19:53
Speaker
But for this particular book, I wanted it to capture the...
00:19:59
Speaker
kind of the magic of the original.
00:20:02
Speaker
So the earliest Halo novels, the stuff that's been released recently is actually phenomenal.
00:20:08
Speaker
Amazing.
00:20:09
Speaker
It's its own thing.
00:20:10
Speaker
It definitely has its own sort of life of its own.
00:20:13
Speaker
It feels very much like Kelly and Troy.
00:20:18
Speaker
They just shout out Kelly Gay, who is probably listening to this episode.
00:20:22
Speaker
They do what they do really well.
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:26
Speaker
And, uh, and, but there, there are certain things in the earlier novels, uh, Nyland and Staten that, um, that aren't things that we kind of visited in a long time.
00:20:37
Speaker
And so as I was thinking about, if we're going to do a novel that kind of refreshes and builds this platform on which the new readers, the new players can come in, I wanted to, I wanted to capture that magic.
00:20:51
Speaker
From the older novels.
00:20:52
Speaker
And so I think, I mean, I hope some of the things that people pull from Empty Throne will be a return to that kind of form.
00:21:03
Speaker
And we'll see where the Halo team goes with it from there.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:07
Speaker
Rock on.
00:21:09
Speaker
So you're at a halo now.
00:21:13
Speaker
What if you had there was another franchise that you could dive into and do kind of like a similar thing where you were you're either writing for it or or being like within the glue of the of the story lore or what have you.
00:21:30
Speaker
What would you want to do?
00:21:33
Speaker
Anything's on the table.
00:21:34
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:21:38
Speaker
I think I could give you the easy ones off the top of my head would be something in Star Wars or something in Lord of the Rings.
00:21:48
Speaker
Right now I'm working on a game project with a studio called Anchor Point out of Barcelona and we're doing some really cool stuff there that's fun.
00:21:56
Speaker
It's new.
00:21:57
Speaker
Everything's new about it.
00:21:59
Speaker
I really feel like if it was blue sky for me, what I want to do is I'd want to tell...
00:22:07
Speaker
my own story.
00:22:08
Speaker
I would want to kind of start from scratch and, and build the universe from the foundation up and then, and then tell that.
00:22:16
Speaker
So maybe that'll happen at some point in the future, but,
00:22:19
Speaker
But I would say rather than another franchise, which I think is cool to do, especially, I mean, people like Troy and Kelly who can step into another world and do licensed products, that's a skill set in and of itself because you have so many hoops you're jumping through.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
00:22:42
Speaker
I don't know if that's me.
00:22:43
Speaker
I just think I don't have the tool set for that.
00:22:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's rough.
00:22:52
Speaker
Do you think that that made writing this novel a little easier, the fact that this is just imprinted in your DNA at this point?
00:23:02
Speaker
I mean, I don't know how imprinted it is now, two years out.
00:23:05
Speaker
So don't ask me any questions about it.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough.
00:23:09
Speaker
Been breathing other airs since then.
00:23:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was easier.
00:23:15
Speaker
I mean, a lot of the stuff that you read in the encyclopedia and a lot of the stuff that comes out in the novels are things that, I mean, the authors obviously bring their own stuff to the table, and that's vital.
00:23:29
Speaker
But it's things that the people that are on the writing side of the franchise team, so Jeff Easterling and now Alex, these guys –
00:23:40
Speaker
It's what they eat and sleep.
00:23:42
Speaker
And so they don't need to necessarily go to the resource.
00:23:46
Speaker
They just say it.
00:23:47
Speaker
And so that's kind of my time there was, you know, you've got to be kind of a walking, talking encyclopedia because you're being brought into all these different areas.
00:23:58
Speaker
meetings and having to speak off the cuff about sometimes the most absurdly, you know, intricate details that are 10 years removed from the game or the book that's being worked on.
00:24:12
Speaker
And so it's important to have that knowledge ingrained.
00:24:15
Speaker
But I do think that helped a lot.
00:24:18
Speaker
I don't know if I could recreate it, to be perfectly honest.
00:24:22
Speaker
It's been a while and there's been a lot of, I've worked on a lot of stuff since then.
00:24:25
Speaker
So cool.
00:24:28
Speaker
Uh, what is, and this is a, it's, it's always tough to, to pick a favorite child, but, uh, of the characters that are either in this book or that you had some sort of a influence on over the, of the course of the past, you know, 15 years or so, uh, who's your favorite?
00:24:48
Speaker
Oh man.
00:24:52
Speaker
Who's your favorite kid?
00:24:53
Speaker
You know, so I'll just, I'll kind of close the aperture to just this book.
00:25:02
Speaker
Sure.
00:25:03
Speaker
Because there's characters that I loved along the way, but I think in this book, the two individuals who are, I loved all the characters, but the two individuals who are on the, on the cover of,
00:25:16
Speaker
That, like I said early on, that really was the seed of the whole story.
00:25:21
Speaker
Everything else kind of pulled into it.
00:25:24
Speaker
And for the people who are familiar with Halo universe, they'll see there are plenty of deep, deep, deep, deep cuts in this book that go back to the very beginning, to things that fans of Halo will be surprised at.
00:25:41
Speaker
places that we go to like ARGs and stuff like that, that we've done in the past, um, obscure facts.
00:25:48
Speaker
And, um, but I think that the two characters on the cover are really where kind of my heart was emotionally telling this story.
00:25:56
Speaker
You take that thread out and, um,
00:25:59
Speaker
for plot reasons and really for the spirit of the novel.
00:26:03
Speaker
I think it kind of gets extracted.
00:26:05
Speaker
And so those two characters, I won't reveal who they are.
00:26:09
Speaker
One's an old favorite character.
00:26:10
Speaker
One's a new character with roots that go into the oldest parts of the universe.
00:26:16
Speaker
Or I should say the oldest parts of the human component of the Halo universe.
00:26:21
Speaker
Okay.
00:26:22
Speaker
We've got one last question.
00:26:23
Speaker
This is, this is one that we, we always, we tend to end it on and, but I'm going to, I'm going to vary it a little bit.
00:26:30
Speaker
Cause like I mentioned before, we talked to a lot of writers for hire, that sort of thing.
00:26:34
Speaker
And, and with your experience of this, you're just so much more than that.
Dedication in Writing
00:26:39
Speaker
You, you've worked within the universe more than just writing the, a novel or a short story or something like that.
00:26:47
Speaker
So, um,
00:26:49
Speaker
We usually ask, what advice do you have for anyone who might want to be a writer for hire?
00:26:55
Speaker
But I mean, with working in narrative design and everything, it's kind of a unicorn job, isn't it?
00:27:00
Speaker
You know, that's a tough one.
00:27:02
Speaker
So what advice do you have for people who want to write for games?
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, games industry is a little bit wild right now.
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:27:12
Speaker
I'd say it looks somewhere else, but no, no.
00:27:15
Speaker
Whether it's games or whether it's novels, whether you want to be a novelist or whatever it is, I'm going to go back to, and this was actually encouraging to me.
00:27:26
Speaker
I saw this quote.
00:27:27
Speaker
I think it's Bill Dietz.
00:27:29
Speaker
Other people may have said it.
00:27:31
Speaker
But I found this super profound is a quote where he said, if you write one page a day by the end of a year,
00:27:39
Speaker
And I think the hardest part for people who either consider themselves storytellers or like to tell stories and want to be a storyteller is getting to that end point.
00:27:53
Speaker
It's the goal.
00:27:54
Speaker
Anybody can start a chapter, maybe three chapters, maybe 10 chapters, but getting to the last chapter is sometimes the most difficult.
00:28:03
Speaker
And so what I would say is...
00:28:06
Speaker
The rubric that a person who's a prospective writer, no matter what field you're looking in, is going to be dedication and commitment and a refusal to sort of let go of the dream that you have, even when it becomes disinteresting or you are enamored by something else to just plant your heels in the ground, keep digging.
00:28:27
Speaker
and keep building one page after another.
00:28:30
Speaker
And then when you get to the end of it, and you have to go back and edit it a dozen times, which is another painful process.
00:28:37
Speaker
But when you get to the end of it, you'll at least be able to say, I stuck in there.
00:28:41
Speaker
And I think that's the hardest part for a lot of writers is that they're
00:28:46
Speaker
The finish line is so far away that you get discouraged.
00:28:49
Speaker
And I would just say, don't, don't get discouraged.
00:28:51
Speaker
Just write.
00:28:52
Speaker
I mean, even if you have to go to one page a day, do that.
00:28:55
Speaker
And at some point you're going to be able to say that's, that's the last page and close the book on it.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:01
Speaker
And it is, it was Bill Dietz who said that while he was talking about how he kept his corporate job for 15 years.
00:29:09
Speaker
And in that same time wrote 15 books.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:13
Speaker
One page a day.
00:29:15
Speaker
One page a day.
00:29:16
Speaker
That's it.
00:29:18
Speaker
So he's got, yeah, 15 books.
00:29:19
Speaker
There you go.
00:29:22
Speaker
It is honestly like that is the most important thing.
00:29:24
Speaker
I think it's dedication.
00:29:25
Speaker
Anybody can come up with really cool, clever ideas, but to implement them in a full orbed, you know, from front to back kind of way is hard.
00:29:34
Speaker
That's hard.
00:29:35
Speaker
And so it just takes a commitment to it and a loyalty to your dream.
Interview Reflection and Gaming Experiences
00:29:40
Speaker
Uh, so that was a, that was a good interview.
00:29:43
Speaker
That was great.
00:29:44
Speaker
That was, that was, I, it's, it's super fun not to just talk to, uh, the people.
00:29:51
Speaker
Cause there is no disrespect at all to any of the authors we've talked to at all.
00:29:55
Speaker
Uh, but so many of them, um,
00:29:58
Speaker
are adding so much, uh, so much to the Canon after the fact, kind of.
00:30:03
Speaker
Sure.
00:30:03
Speaker
And, uh, and while he pointed out, he didn't start in halo one or anything like that.
00:30:08
Speaker
Dude has been, by the time this book comes out, he has been there for more than a dozen years.
00:30:15
Speaker
Uh, you know, and,
00:30:17
Speaker
And fleshing this out and directing it, directing a lot of the writers that we know and love.
00:30:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's neat stuff.
00:30:26
Speaker
And I'm glad I was going to mention it to him.
00:30:29
Speaker
But it's funny because the book almost feels like.
00:30:33
Speaker
Uh, it's like a capstone or a thesis project, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:30:39
Speaker
That's actually a great way of looking at it.
00:30:41
Speaker
It's his, it's his dissertation in a way, like just proving everything that he learned.
00:30:47
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing.
00:30:48
Speaker
That's funny.
00:30:49
Speaker
Okay.
00:30:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:50
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense actually.
00:30:51
Speaker
Well, now that we've finished the interview, I guess we're ending the show.
00:30:55
Speaker
Psych.
00:30:56
Speaker
No.
00:30:57
Speaker
What are you playing?
00:30:59
Speaker
Oh, well, well, last episode.
00:31:03
Speaker
Well, no, I guess it wasn't last episode.
00:31:04
Speaker
This is going to be kind of out of order.
00:31:06
Speaker
It's going to be a little bit out of order because we're recording this before we actually air the book episode.
00:31:11
Speaker
Right.
00:31:12
Speaker
Right.
00:31:12
Speaker
Bear with us for some out of order.
00:31:15
Speaker
What are your plans?
00:31:16
Speaker
But you can deal with it.
00:31:17
Speaker
Right.
00:31:18
Speaker
I can.
00:31:18
Speaker
They can.
00:31:19
Speaker
They'll live.
00:31:19
Speaker
And it's just been demos for me because the last time we spoke, we were talking about Next Fest stuff and I had never really taken part in that.
00:31:27
Speaker
And at the end of the episode, you and I just looked up a bunch of them and downloaded a bunch of them.
00:31:31
Speaker
So I played a few of those.
00:31:32
Speaker
Sure.
00:31:34
Speaker
First and foremost, I played Deck of Haunts and your assessment of the game where there's just something missing.
00:31:41
Speaker
It needs something.
00:31:42
Speaker
I couldn't agree more.
00:31:43
Speaker
And it's frustrating because it is very cool.
00:31:47
Speaker
There's something there.
00:31:50
Speaker
And this idea of a haunted house strategy game.
00:31:54
Speaker
there's something there and it's missing.
00:31:56
Speaker
And I think, I think what it needs is some sort of variation because right now the cycle that you play through gets very samey.
00:32:06
Speaker
Um, and, and it's like, you can take out people through body damage.
00:32:10
Speaker
You can take them out through sanity.
00:32:13
Speaker
Uh, and, but they're all kind of the same in the end.
00:32:15
Speaker
It's all kind of, it's, it's, it's, it's just what you prefer or what you have the most of in your hand.
00:32:20
Speaker
Um,
00:32:21
Speaker
It just kind of makes it rudimentary.
00:32:22
Speaker
So I agree with that assessment.
00:32:24
Speaker
I think there's something here.
00:32:27
Speaker
And as they point out all the time in these demos, you know, they're like, but this is still a work in progress.
00:32:31
Speaker
And I hope by the time this comes out, if the game has released that we've got
00:32:38
Speaker
more thoughtful things to say about it because these guys have got something here.
00:32:42
Speaker
It needs a little bit more juice.
00:32:45
Speaker
That's all.
00:32:45
Speaker
That's all.
00:32:46
Speaker
We've played a lot of games and there are games that are like, quit now.
00:32:49
Speaker
Just don't even fucking bother.
00:32:50
Speaker
This is not one of those games.
00:32:53
Speaker
So I'd really like to see them do more there.
00:32:57
Speaker
I played He is Coming.
00:33:00
Speaker
Uh, which is, which is not what it sounds like.
00:33:03
Speaker
It's a guy ejaculating wildly.
00:33:06
Speaker
Uh, no, just, uh, this one is super fun.
00:33:11
Speaker
It's by developer called, uh, Chronicle.
00:33:14
Speaker
And I say it that way because they spell it C H R O N O C L E. Um, sure.
00:33:20
Speaker
As you do, it's got,
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, of course, it's got kind of a Commodore Atari vibe to it.
00:33:27
Speaker
Very old school roguelike fantasy kind of thing.
00:33:31
Speaker
And the whole deal is that you're a warrior in this medieval world and you're just exploring, going around and looking for treasure and looking for new weapons and trying to equip yourself with all the best stuff like you do.
00:33:43
Speaker
But as it's happening, you have a specific number of days and nights that go by.
00:33:49
Speaker
And at the end of that
00:33:52
Speaker
cycle, some eldritch horror will show up and you have to fight it.
00:33:58
Speaker
And you know what it is.
00:33:59
Speaker
You can see its stats so you can prepare properly for it because they're all different and they're all randomized.
00:34:07
Speaker
But you've got to fight little wolves and bears and monsters like that and equip yourself better and slowly go through this roster of monsters.
00:34:19
Speaker
And like a lot of games nowadays, it's got that roguelike element where, you know, doing certain things, you unlock different weapons that you can find.
00:34:25
Speaker
Sure.
00:34:27
Speaker
It's very simple, but very engaging.
00:34:31
Speaker
I was really impressed with it.
00:34:35
Speaker
I think there's something there as well where it's just
00:34:38
Speaker
It could get a little samey.
00:34:40
Speaker
I've only gotten to the point where, because literally after you beat that horror, you just start the cycle over again as the same character, admittedly.
00:34:48
Speaker
And you get a little more space for items and stuff.
00:34:51
Speaker
But I'm hoping that there is something to that loop, that...
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:02
Speaker
Maybe it needs.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:03
Speaker
Maybe it needs something like a loop hero where it makes me think it makes me think of loop hero a lot, actually.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:12
Speaker
It's very loop hero.
00:35:14
Speaker
It's very collectible kind of thing.
00:35:15
Speaker
There are all these items you can collect and that's super fun.
00:35:18
Speaker
So I was impressed with that one.
00:35:20
Speaker
But the one that I played the absolute most of is called Nidica.
00:35:28
Speaker
Knight as in knight in shining armor.
00:35:31
Speaker
This is by Mad Mango Games.
00:35:33
Speaker
And this is a strategy.
00:35:38
Speaker
It's like an auto battler, but you're building up this.
00:35:42
Speaker
You go through different battles and you're building up your army.
00:35:46
Speaker
The aesthetic style is really cute.
00:35:50
Speaker
Uh, it's, it's got a really unique cartoony kind of vibe to it, which is wonderful.
00:35:57
Speaker
It really sets itself apart.
00:35:59
Speaker
Um, you're also building up your, uh, uh, troops as you go and you have the option of swapping people out and this guy might have more experience, but this guy is better than just all the good shit that comes with this kind of strategy game.
00:36:16
Speaker
Um,
00:36:17
Speaker
But it's just got a great vibe to it.
00:36:19
Speaker
It has a great feel.
00:36:20
Speaker
It's aggressively difficult at times.
00:36:24
Speaker
Sure.
00:36:27
Speaker
But in a great way.
00:36:29
Speaker
And I spent about three hours with the demo.
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:32
Speaker
It's that one, I think out of everything that I've played, all the demos I played and which one is that called?
00:36:38
Speaker
What's what's called night night.
00:36:40
Speaker
Like Nigh.
00:36:41
Speaker
And I G H T I C A Mad mango game.
00:36:45
Speaker
I, I think there's, it was a lot of fun.
00:36:48
Speaker
I've put a few hours into it and, uh,
00:36:51
Speaker
It's simple.
00:36:54
Speaker
It's just simple enough.
00:36:56
Speaker
But also there is a hell of a lot of complexity there that you can do in terms of synergizing different abilities and ranking up different people at different times.
00:37:06
Speaker
This looks cute.
00:37:08
Speaker
I love the aesthetics.
00:37:10
Speaker
I would be a liar if I suggested that like 40% of my enjoyment of this game was not.
00:37:15
Speaker
It's just how adorable everything is.
00:37:18
Speaker
It's really neat.
00:37:20
Speaker
It's really unique.
00:37:21
Speaker
And you can also pick different heroes.
00:37:23
Speaker
Like when you start out, there's just the warrior and he's got very basic kind of, you know, soldierly kind of bonuses.
00:37:30
Speaker
And then you can unlock the ghoul, which has more of an undead vibe to it.
00:37:34
Speaker
And there are a shit ton of them that you can unlock.
00:37:38
Speaker
I like that.
00:37:40
Speaker
I really do.
00:37:40
Speaker
It clicked.
00:37:42
Speaker
Something really clicked for me.
00:37:45
Speaker
I really enjoy that.
00:37:45
Speaker
So Nydica, I definitely think people should pick that one up.
00:37:49
Speaker
Kevin, what are you playing?
00:37:50
Speaker
What am I playing?
00:37:52
Speaker
Not nearly as much as you.
Gaming Routine and Recommendations
00:37:55
Speaker
I'm still playing some more Rogue Trader because it's my bullshit.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:38:02
Speaker
At this point, I just go in there and I muck around with different builds and stuff like that.
00:38:10
Speaker
Playing avowed still getting, you know, a come and go on it because you know what the dumbest reason why sometimes I forget about playing it is because I'm playing it through Game Pass.
00:38:23
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:38:24
Speaker
I default by going to my Steam and I'm like,
00:38:27
Speaker
What was I playing again?
00:38:29
Speaker
Oh, I don't know.
00:38:30
Speaker
I guess it's Rogue Trader.
00:38:32
Speaker
And I start playing Rogue Trader.
00:38:33
Speaker
It's not in front of your face.
00:38:34
Speaker
It's not in front of my face.
00:38:36
Speaker
So I just didn't think about playing Avowed.
00:38:39
Speaker
So every time I remember that I have it on Game Pass, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's the thing I was... Right.
00:38:46
Speaker
It's still a really neat game.
00:38:49
Speaker
I think they were really on to something in terms of...
00:38:54
Speaker
structure and gameplay and all that stuff.
00:38:56
Speaker
If you're looking for something that has is as like deep as Skyrim and I don't even necessarily want to call Skyrim deep, maybe interactive like Skyrim.
00:39:07
Speaker
You can go and you could just like kill anybody and steal everything and do whatever.
00:39:13
Speaker
I remember in Morrowind, my college roommate built a house for himself out of skulls that he found.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yeah, he just yeah.
00:39:23
Speaker
perfectly acceptable in morrowind you could totally do that without needing like a big patch or anything like yeah he just stacks up stacking up skulls um turned it into a house um yeah so like little like that you can't do that in in in avowed right it's more it's much more streamlined it's a streamlined version of those types of games though
00:39:50
Speaker
Except the combat is a million times better.
00:39:54
Speaker
I will fight anybody on that.
00:39:56
Speaker
It's just more entertaining to play in terms of combat than Skyrim or Oblivion or Morrowind or whatever.
00:40:05
Speaker
So if they can continue developing this style of gameplay further, let's say into Outer Wilds 2, Outer Worlds 2.
00:40:18
Speaker
Outer Worlds 2, yeah.
00:40:22
Speaker
Yeah, there is no Outer Wilds 2.
00:40:24
Speaker
No, not yet.
00:40:25
Speaker
Not yet.
00:40:27
Speaker
Or ever.
00:40:27
Speaker
I don't know.
00:40:28
Speaker
Given how the game ends.
00:40:31
Speaker
Outer Worlds 2 will I think it would be they're going to be really on to something.
00:40:40
Speaker
A lot of folks are, you know,
00:40:44
Speaker
I'm sure there's woke backlash against the game or something.
00:40:49
Speaker
I don't know.
00:40:50
Speaker
And there's Skyrim fanboys who hop into the comments every time you talk about every time you talk positively about avowed.
00:40:59
Speaker
There's people who are just like, I would just rather play the Skyrim with guns modded into it.
00:41:05
Speaker
Um...
00:41:05
Speaker
And I was like, okay, fine.
00:41:08
Speaker
But Avowed has guns and it's fun.
00:41:11
Speaker
It's got little flintlock pistols and rifles and they're amazing.
00:41:17
Speaker
What else am I playing?
00:41:18
Speaker
I've been trying to find something and I just don't know what I want.
00:41:23
Speaker
There's been a taste that I've been searching for and I don't...
00:41:29
Speaker
I don't know what it is yet.
00:41:30
Speaker
Maybe you can help me.
00:41:32
Speaker
I want something Warhammer 40K, right?
00:41:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:41:36
Speaker
I want it hot and fresh and ready to go in a box and delicious.
00:41:42
Speaker
No, I want... It's almost like I'm either looking for a full-on 4X game...
00:41:53
Speaker
or either that or an XCOM style game that isn't rogue because like Rogue Trader is tactical combat like XCOM, but I'm talking more like it's really just the missions, you know, right?
00:42:09
Speaker
XCOM, there's no real like running around in between.
00:42:12
Speaker
It's just we're just going in for the missions.
00:42:15
Speaker
uh so either that or something 4x because i played battle sector that was not what i wanted i was like no that's not the flavor i'm looking for um that's turn-based but it's not quite not there you know um i want to control maybe like an individual i want to control either armies
00:42:38
Speaker
or an individual space marine, not like a squad of six dudes.
00:42:43
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:42:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:42:44
Speaker
So not like not like that.
00:42:46
Speaker
All sectors like in the middle.
00:42:47
Speaker
Right.
00:42:48
Speaker
Right.
00:42:48
Speaker
So not like demon hunters, the big chaos gate thing.
00:42:54
Speaker
They did the 40K XCOM game because that's like a team of Grey Knights.
00:43:02
Speaker
Oh, OK.
00:43:02
Speaker
So Demon Hunters.
00:43:04
Speaker
No, I haven't.
00:43:05
Speaker
Demon Hunters.
00:43:06
Speaker
Chaos Gate Demon Hunters.
00:43:09
Speaker
Oh, is that they spoke the English way?
00:43:13
Speaker
Damon hunters, Damon hunters, Damon hunters.
00:43:17
Speaker
Give me that show to.
00:43:19
Speaker
Oh, this might be it.
00:43:20
Speaker
This might be what I want.
00:43:22
Speaker
I've got it.
00:43:23
Speaker
It's 70% off right now.
00:43:25
Speaker
Oh, OK.
00:43:27
Speaker
It's and it's got some DLC.
00:43:30
Speaker
It wasn't for me.
00:43:31
Speaker
Ultimately, I keep wanting to get back to it, but it was only not for me because I I couldn't tell my guys apart.
00:43:40
Speaker
Sure.
00:43:42
Speaker
You know, if it had been like a collection of space breeds from different chapters or something like that, at least I would have that.
00:43:48
Speaker
But they're all kind of equipped the same way.
00:43:50
Speaker
They all kind of look the same.
00:43:52
Speaker
And so I would I would really get them mixed up and not be terribly efficient.
00:43:57
Speaker
Did you get this for me for Christmas?
00:44:00
Speaker
I may have, maybe I did.
00:44:01
Speaker
You have it.
00:44:02
Speaker
It's in your library.
00:44:03
Speaker
I was like, oh, it's in my library.
00:44:05
Speaker
Maybe you already bought it.
00:44:07
Speaker
I don't remember buying this.
00:44:09
Speaker
I think this might have been a Christmas gift from you.
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah, there you go.
00:44:14
Speaker
There you go.
00:44:14
Speaker
So there you have it.
00:44:15
Speaker
That's that was not that was not a passive aggressive way.
00:44:18
Speaker
There it is.
00:44:19
Speaker
I got you a present, Kevin.
00:44:23
Speaker
You you wanted help.
00:44:25
Speaker
You were looking for something specific.
Show Wrap-Up
00:44:27
Speaker
By God, I delivered it years ago.
00:44:30
Speaker
Years.
00:44:36
Speaker
It was just this past Christmas.
00:44:38
Speaker
Years.
00:44:41
Speaker
Oh, OK.
00:44:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:44
Speaker
Hold on.
00:44:45
Speaker
Come here.
00:44:48
Speaker
All good?
00:44:49
Speaker
Cats?
00:44:50
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:44:51
Speaker
Oh, baby.
00:44:52
Speaker
Kinda.
00:44:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:56
Speaker
Say hi, Graham.
00:44:57
Speaker
Oh, the baby.
00:44:57
Speaker
Hello.
00:44:59
Speaker
Who's your grandma?
00:45:00
Speaker
Who's your Grammy?
00:45:01
Speaker
Oh, hi.
00:45:02
Speaker
Say hi, then.
00:45:03
Speaker
Huh?
00:45:05
Speaker
No.
00:45:05
Speaker
No.
00:45:15
Speaker
It's like, what is going on?
00:45:18
Speaker
That's the end of the show.
00:45:19
Speaker
We're just going to talk.
00:45:21
Speaker
That's it.
00:45:21
Speaker
That's it.
00:45:21
Speaker
It's the Graham show.
00:45:23
Speaker
Say bye-bye, Graham.
00:45:24
Speaker
Say bye-bye.