Retro Warriors 497 - Namco

I'm talking about the record where it's at 497. I was always a real Justin Baker, and as always, I'm joined by a viral human press Saturn. 497 episodes in. You're a consummate professional at this point.

I just want to compliment you on how effectively and consistently you open our show. No one ever listened to the uncut. You'll never know. Just believe that we do it good once.

Yeah, we do good every time. Oh, yeah. Anyone that believes that probably also believes that plays are just done off the top of people's heads when they go to the theater. First time reading the script.

We do have some housekeeping, which is that, first off, I've begun, re-begun, restarted, re-begun. Re-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be- streaming to the Twitch. I'm trying to do it more. The Amazon Twitch?

The Amazon's Twitch. Yep, Amazon's Twitch with Dante from Devil May Cry. So I've been trying to do lunchtime streams for at least a couple hours, two or three times a week. So that's like 11 to 1-ish central, where UTC-6 for those people that want to do the math.

Well, this time of year we are during the day, like I say, sometimes the changes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But I am streaming. So if you want to come hang out while I stream for a nice lunch time stream, or if you're in the UK and maybe like evening stream, I think it'd be like 4, 5, 6, 6 o'clock for the evening.

There's six hours ahead of us. OK, so somewhere around there. Somewhere around there. After work stream for them.

But it's been fun. I quit doing it previously because I hated it. And so I'm trying to find stuff that I enjoy streaming more because I'm learning that the thing I'm streaming has a big impact on how much I enjoy streaming. You don't say?

I know. And so things, games that take a lot of my attention, are really hard for me to stream, because I'm very bad at games. And so I get all hyper-focused on the game. And I'm like, oh, yeah, there's a camera pointed at me.

And I'm on chat. So I've been trying to play more relaxing things. Also, we have to note, as of the night of recording, the Switch 2 has been announced. Revealed.

It was announced some time ago. Today, they just showed a two minute video of what it looks like. The teaser has happened. We're recording on the 16th of January.

But because we put the news split chronologically between the two shows, we will not be discussing that until next episode. I just wanted to say that for people that come to our show for timely news, what are you doing? Yeah, why? Because we record in batches.

We get the news every two weeks. And so it's just going to be especially if you're on the main feed, you're not on the uncut feed. If you're on the uncut feed, it'll be relatively timely. But if you're on the main feed and you're listening primarily that way, then you're going to get us talking about it a week late.

So for a whole week, if you're like, why didn't they mention the Switch 2? That's why. Because we record in batches. So it's just how time works.

So my week, I'm currently at, let's say I was going to look at the number again, 300. Hold on. 300, it's loading. Steen, 332.3 hours of cookie clicker.

OK. I've got 308 hours. Yeah, so I'm a little heady. I'm running it for like a day and a half though.

Yeah, I had stopped running it for a few days there just because I've not really gotten anything new out of it. And so I felt like I was kind of done with it. Cookie clicker is an idle game for people that don't know, which is its own very. I think we discussed it last time.

I think we did. But it's just its own genre. I think I've kind of like mined the depth of it for the most part. And I think I've just reached the point where it's like just figuring out how to mathematically maximize things and be as efficient as possible.

And that's where I kind of fall out of it. My prestige level hit too quadrillion. And I was like, I don't think I'm getting anything additional out of this anymore. Yeah, I'd like to finish the Tech Trees in it.

But it seems like you just got to grind out the hours for that. And when I'm playing it on Steam and it's running upstairs, I can't play Steam games elsewhere because it boots it off. And if I boot up Steam and offline mode, I don't think I get achievements while I'm playing. You sometimes can, but it doesn't time-stand.

But then also I don't get my heralds, which doubles my cookies. So I think for the dollar I paid for it to get 332 hours out of it, not that they were active hours, as well as sitting idle. Then that's fine. Also, I've been streaming MMOs and I started with Guild Wars 2.

I don't know if you call it a series or not, but when I stream I really want people coming in, because a lot of people come in and they seem to have expectations that, oh, you're a person that's streaming video games. You must know how to play video games. And I don't know how to play video games. And so my streams are always entitled.

I don't know how to play game title. So I did a couple of streams of I don't know how to play Guild Wars 2. And it's pretty fun. I'm pretty impressed with it.

I've kind of been in that MMO mood lately. I get in that mood in the winter time. And 14 just wasn't sticking for me. I kept trying to get through Heaven's Word.

And it was just fucking slog. It's just not consistently fun. Like fun is there. Fun can be had, but it's not consistent enough for me.

You know what I mean? I feel like you and I enjoy the opposite things and those kind of games. Yeah. Like I would log in and I'd go on and log in and play for 20 minutes and just be like, this is just kind of miserable and nothing happened.

And then other times I'd log in and play for an hour and be like, oh, this is pretty fun. I got to have a fun time. And so I was just kind of struggling with it. And I was looking for something else.

And I was like, well, let's try Guild Wars 2. I think I booted up Lord of Rings online like one time. It was just like, I can't their account system is so fucked. I can't handle it.

I think I was like, I'm not sure if I was last year, I think. Or right around the time I was doing the EverQuest Project 99 show, RuneScape. I came back around to RuneScape and have for whatever reason, I think this is what happened. I think Cookie Clicker unlocked some kind of weird idol game thing in my brain.

Because I really enjoy the idea of just something that I can just sort of leave running at all times and poke at sometimes. And RuneScape is very much like an idol. It's like DNA is like part idol game. And I never really knew that about the game because at the low levels, everything comes so fast that you can't really idol any of your skills or anything.

You kind of got to be at the computer for it. But when you start gaining levels, things start taking more protracted amounts of time. But the mechanics of the game, while complex in the way they interact with each other, the actual way you as the player interact with the mechanics are usually pretty simple. So like fighting an enemy is click on an enemy and then your man will fight that man until one of you is no more.

So there's less men's. Right, and that's it. There's no like high levels, you can do some special stuff. But for the most part, the combat is just your stats versus their stats and you click on them and it goes.

And so as you get higher level, the things you're doing take longer amounts of time. So you can legitimately AFK the game. Like I've been grinding combat the last couple days and it just is going in my living room. And as long as I interact with the UI at least once every half hour, which usually I walk through the living room at least once every half hour.

So I just push my mouse button when I walk through. My guy will stay there and keep fighting crabs. I see. And so I'm finding ways to kind of turn it into an idle game.

But then here's the tricky part. When I sit down and I'm like, oh, I'm going to play an actual. I want to get some actual game time in. Well, RuneScape is already open.

And I've gained a level or two and some stuff. So I've kind of unlocked some new content. And the other half of the game is active, interesting content that you can enjoy. And so then I'm like, well, this is already open.

I'll go to a quest or two here. And then up, it's been three hours. So it has just kind of become a part of my daily routine now in that I can idle it. And then when I want to actively play a game, I sit down and do some active content.

And the stuff I do while idling unlocks more and more active time content. And I'm just kind of trapped in this brain chemical cycle, this like Skinner box of software. Yeah. I'm not upset about it.

But then of course, I'm playing the game. And I joined a clan just that people talk to in the game. And it was just like a social one. There's just people to chat with.

And some chatting with people, I'm learning about the game. And they're like, oh, you got to go look up such and such video. Or this historical moment in the game. And I forget that the game's been running for like 24 years.

Nonstop. That's the time now, yeah. And I'm specifically playing old school RuneScapes. There's two RuneScapes, right?

It was a weird thing. And the amount of history that has been preserved in this game through videos and video essays is insane. Like actual historical moments that people, there's like a, some guy was like, oh, you got to look up the Falador Massacre. And I'm like, what?

And it's just literally like 100 videos of people coming through forums and old other videos to document this historical glitch that occurred that caused people to kill each other in town 12 years ago or whatever. It's just it has been too convenient for me to not be constantly interacting with. That's the trap I've fallen into is that it's always open. It's always here.

It's on my phone. It runs on every computer I own because it's an oldest game. I don't think Pat runs it. It runs great on my phone.

It runs on my desktop. It runs on my laptop. It runs on my wife's laptop. It runs on my kids laptop.

It runs on everyone's computer. I think you discovered why it's still running. I think so. Yeah.

So it's just everywhere. And it's always open. And I'm like, oh, I guess I'll do another quest. And I do my quest.

And after I finish my quest, it's like, oh, you need these skills for the next quest. I'm like, all right, well, I'll go grind those. Well, while that's grinding, I'll go make dinner and do chores or go to the store. So I've been doing a lot of RuneScape.

I don't know how many hours. I'm scared to click. They do the smart thing where you can click to see how many hours you play. But before you do it, it gives you a warning that says, are you sure you want to know how many hours you play?

And every time I click it, I go, ah, no, and I chicken out. So that's where I am. A lot of times, Dave, it's time when you've been playing. So a few things.

I did try Caves of Cut because you said it to me. I'm so excited. You should not be because I bounced off it pretty quick and pretty hard. Oh, no, that's not good.

I opened it up and was immediately overwhelmed by everything. It is. Well, yeah, like I said, you have that session zero where you just kind of figure shit out for an hour or two. Yeah, I did the tutorial because it has a little interactive tutorial thing.

And immediately was just turned off by everything. Because there's no background in my character. There's no expository introduction. There's nothing to get me into the world first before it just kind of drops me in.

Yeah, I never really thought about it. I guess the tutorial is very mechanically oriented because it's not until you drop into Java that you can start talking to people and seeing what's going on. Yeah, I was just really struggling to find myself caring about any of it. So I'm going to give it another go.

Maybe outside of the tutorial where I know the basics at least. Yeah, the tutorial is very much like this is how the game mechanically works because so much the backend history is generated procedurally that they can give you history but it's going to be different when you actually generate a game. Yeah, I don't know. I'm going to give it another go, but I'm wary if I'll click with it.

I would say get into Java and go talk to the village elder. And that kind of gives you your quest. It's like, hey, if you're looking at stuff to do, talk to this guy, this guy and then those start you on quest threads. Now, granted, it's still a roguelike.

I mean, it's not like here's our grand prescribed narrative. But it will give you like, hey, here's some people that need help and there's some stuff they need help with. And there's some threads. A path at least.

Yeah, there's a path. Yeah, I didn't really think about that. The tutorial is very much like this is how to mechanically interact with CUD. Yeah.

And then it's like, good, cool. Go to the when you finish the tutorial, it does just drop you into Java. So if you just go all the way through it, it will stitch you out. I got through the tutorial to a town.

And yeah, that's Java. Yeah, I looked around in the town and was like, none of this is doing anything for me at all. Well, yeah. Well, it starts you next to a couple NPCs.

And one of them is like the helper guy that's like, hi, I'm the helper guy. You want to talk to me about shit? Yeah. It did not click with me.

So yeah, I may give it another shot and see if I can get anywhere. I was playing around with my PSVR2 a little bit more. Oh, yeah. I plugged it back into the PlayStation to see what I could do with that.

And I will give it credit for this. The on the PS5, it immediately detects that it's plugged in, obviously. And once you put it on, it immediately detects that someone is wearing it. And it starts tracking your eyes and everything, because it's got the eye tractors on it.

And as soon as I did put it on, it was like, hey, you've adjusted your settings since the last time you did this, because I was playing with it on my PC. And it was like, do you want to correct your settings to adjust back to the PlayStation? And I assumed that that meant it was going to open up the whole settings screen and make me go through clicking what looks right and everything. And so I hit yes, and it was just like, done.

And it immediately auto-adjusted the focus and everything. It's like, oh, that's much nicer. That does look nicer. But I didn't really have much in VR to play.

I tested the Trial of the Horizon Zero Dawn VR game, because I didn't want to buy it. But I did want to see how it looked and how it played. And it's fine. And I realized that when I first adopted my cat was when I was playing through Horizon Zero Dawn.

And she seemed super interested in that game the whole time that I was playing it. And when I took off my headset, she was just staring at it. She's like, I heard that shit. And it occurred to me that what she liked about that game might have been that there's bird sounds in the background the whole time that you're playing the game.

True. Like when you're exploring the world, there's the sound of birds in the background. Yeah, they have a little sound. You're in a very lush, jungly area of thought.

Yeah. And so I think she just heard the birds in the headset while I was playing the game. She's like, you had birds in there. He's got a bird hat and he's not cheering it.

So that was neat. I will say when you're doing Steam VR, if you want to play a non-VR game and steam on the big virtual screen, you can. But it's a little wonky sometimes. Because it's basically just emulating a big-ass screen on your VR headset.

And so it's basically having to push through an entire Windows desktop to that screen. PSVR does that as well, but it is much faster and more consistent. It instantly snaps to screen mode. There's no background or anything.

There's no environment around the screen. There's on Steam. It's just black void around the screen. But it does work.

It works consistently. I was playing some ease on there, some ease eight. And I wanted to look at a walkthrough. And the PSVR 2 has a pass-through button, where you can just click it and it goes to camera mode.

So you can see the rest of your room, which is great. If you're starting to get it, it's your nauseous or whatever. You just hit that and you can see your room and everything is normal again. But I learned that the cameras are not high enough resolution for me to read a guide on my laptop screen.

It's just a blurry mess. So I have to take off the helmet anyway. I'm like, well, why am I doing this if I can just see my TV screen? I live alone.

It's not like I am having to- You're not even using anyone. Right. So that is a neat feature, not a useful feature for me. And then also on my PC with my PSVR 2, I was playing around with some mods for Sonic 2 while I was wrapping up the achieve on that.

You couldn't get into that. See how to mod it to play to get it. Yeah. Oh, that's in a nice.

Thanks, Konami. Apparently, it's an Unreal Engine 5 thing. I was looking this up. It's like Unreal Engine 5 just is a lot poorly optimized.

And less people explicitly optimize it. It's going to run like trash on most PCs. And so there's some mods to kind of optimize it and make it run a little bit better. And that was able to get it too close to a consistent 30 frames per second on my 3070 i7 setup.

Just playable. Not ideal, but playable. Yeah. Yeah.

So and then I also found a mod that brightens the flashlight to make it easier to see around, which was very necessary in PSVR 2 because I couldn't adjust my screen brightness or anything in there. And so that made it playable. Also, I found a mod that replaces the sound effects that the mannequins make. So it is less sexual and sounds more like a squeaky toy.

And that makes the game infinitely better. Every time I'm surprised by a mannequin, it just sounds like a dog squeaky toy. And it makes me laugh at them every single time. And it's a much better game.

Let's do the news. OK. How about it? Taki Udon, the creator of the Mr.

Pie and prominent retro gaming handheld YouTuber has unveiled an FPG-8 PS1 console for $149. Yeah. This is two very affordable FPG systems. I think he heard my 2025 wish list.

He's like, I don't worry, Justin. I'm going to do that. And I've read some conflicting stuff. Some of you were saying that it looks like you can load other FPGA cores in it and play other consoles on it.

But I don't know if that would be exciting. That would be very exciting. That would be very exciting. Just very happy to see this, very happy to see.

Especially someone that's in the know in the hobby making this. And it's not just another. I mean, obviously, he's teaming up with companies and he's getting manufactured. It's like he's not doing it or looking.

It's not personally building it. But like someone that's in the know in really kind of in the trenches in this area, doing a lot of critiquing, doing a lot of advising on these devices to be spearheading projects like these. It's very nice to see. And it looks like a little tiny PS1.

Oh, yes, very cute. It's great. Like the PlayStation Classic that came out a few years ago that so many of you got that little garbage device looked like a tiny PlayStation, which is cute. And this looks like a tiny PS1.

And that's cuter. I don't know why. It's like the chibi version of the PlayStation. And Log Pocket will be adding the Atari Jaguar core.

So you can all enjoy that toilet. Have a good time. There's a couple of good Jaguar games. OK.

Not enough to justify the price of a Jaguar. But there's a couple of good games on it. I shouldn't complain. Adding more functionality to an existing device is a good thing.

Yes. Amazon has begun canceling long held pre-orders for games, though. Never be able to fulfill. Like the canceled 3DS port of Mighty Number 9 in the Switch version of Metroid Prime 4.

All you people holding out hope if you're pre-orders. Yeah, sorry. Apparently, Amazon and Nintendo are still having a contest fight. So they are just canceling outright pre-orders of Metroid Prime 4.

Leaks say that the budget for the most recent Call of Duty game was around $700 million. Seven. 100 million. Here's what I don't get.

This is what blows my mind. Yeah. I mean, I know that they like they add new stuff to the games and they upgrade engines and stuff. Yeah.

But there's not $700 million worth of technical advancement between titles. Is it just advertising that all of this is? I don't get enough. What's the even up this budget?

What's the point? These games have this kind of budget and are still profitable. Yeah. The executives who sign off on these budgets, do they ever occasionally look at something like Bellatro and think, oh shit, we could have been doing this for $40.

No, they would look at Bellatro and go, why aren't you charging for those booster packs? Right. I just get to get them in the game for free for no money. Does he make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things where everyone's like, games, you hear it all the time from C-suite executives. Games really should cost more than $70.

Maybe they would need to cost more than $70 if you didn't spend over half a billion dollars making them. Right. I don't know. I mean, I'm not a fucking mathematician here and economist or whatever.

It just seems like a lot for a shooting gun game. It's all I'm saying. It just feels like there are so many good games still coming out that are on low budgets. Yeah.

Do they not realize that's an option? I don't know. I don't know what to think anymore. And you know, we're going to be hearing in the next year that the budget for GTA 6 will end up being.

I bet you I would bet you it breaks a billion. Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked to hear it. Columbia Pictures announced films based on Horizon Zero Dawn and Hell Divers.

We're going to have a Hell Divers movie. It's called Starship Troopers. Paul Berhoeven made it in the early 2000s. It's a perfect film.

So no, no, unless you like trash. Trash that don't even understand the point that the first movie was making. I remember watching one of the sequels and I was like, when did they get to the biting satire of the military industrial complex and imperialism? And I'm like, oh, they just thought it was serious the whole time.

Yeah, it's shocking how many people think that Starship Troopers like that just took it seriously. Yeah, I would be kind of shocked if it's because Hell Divers, I don't know, like it is also trying to make that same joke. But a lot of fans don't seem to get that. And I'm curious to see if that the movie tries to make that joke or if it just goes fine, we'll just do it earnestly.

And we'll just do a fascism, I guess, which is, you know, like, I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. Nvidia has announced official Steam Deck support for GeForce Now. We'll also support Apple Vision Pro in Metacrest.

It is also upgrading the hardware to support 4K streaming. So this is all good news to hear from GeForce Now. And all those things were kind of unofficially supported if you just ran it through a browser window. Right, you could get it.

But now you can get like proper apps for GeForce Now that don't have to also have the overhead of running a browser at the same time. Also from Nvidia, the upcoming Nvidia RTX 5090 will retail for an eye-watering $1,999. If you are the person that is spending $2,000 on a graphics card, please join our Discord so I can ask a million questions. I really want to know what the fuck you got going on.

Like, you got like quadruple 8K monitors, all running triple A games simultaneously. Like, what are you doing? They're just only running Silent Hill 2, but they can almost hit you in the second. Yeah, 1080.

Yeah. I just, I don't, I understand the hardware treadmill that these companies want us to be on, but it just, it hasn't, even, even when you're playing these big triple A games, so many of them come out of the gate and so poorly optimized, that like, really, what are you running out of 59? Yeah, I really legitimately want to know. I'm curious.

Yeah, I remember there was a point about 15 years ago when the PS3 and the 360 were still the relevant consoles, and PS3 was still pretty expensive, like $4, $500 at that point. And you could get a decent, reasonable gaming PC for about $1,100. Yep. And it would handle everything that the 360 and the PS3 could.

And I remember thinking at that point, like, well, the price of PCs are going to come down where they're probably going to hit equilibrium with consoles. And then Nvidia is like, no, no, no. Like, what's, like, I mean, there's the things to consider, right? Like, games made for consoles are tailored to that specific console hardware.

They can optimize it better than they can on just general PC release. So I get that that creates a disparity. But like, middle of the road PC hardware is really fucking good right now. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know, maybe I'm the jaded one. Maybe everyone else is like, hell yeah, $2,000, 59, I'm going to run my games at 16K. Now let's not forget that just six years ago, the highest end Nvidia card was like $600, $700. True.

True. And it's come up this much just because during COVID, during the shortages, and all the scalpers were making money, all these hardware manufacturers were like, oh shit, we could have been making that money. Yeah, I get it. I know there are some people out there that they're like, I will spend any amount of money for an incremental game.

They're just those percentage chasers that just need to have that perfect, you know, it has to be the best. I get that. That ain't me, but I understand some people are like that. I just, someone out there has a legitimate use case.

Or we're like folding proteins or something. Like who's using this? The US Department of Defense has designated Tinscent as a Chinese military company, which could have far reaching ramifications in the media in video game landscape. Obviously we don't.

Let's not forget Tinscent was the highest grossing video game company in the world last year. I don't want to get political on the show. But in coming days, this could be relevant information, a relevant designation that leads to action in some way. Yeah.

We'll see. We don't know what this is going to mean. But it could mean something in the video game space. So just be prepared.

Be aware. I don't love Tinscent to begin with. I don't know that any of us does. You know, as far as them being a massive media conglomerate.

Right. But we'll see what this means. Yeah. Multiple reports on Reddit say that sealed switch games are being opened to find a spacer and a googly eye in place of a game.

Yeah, I saw at least 10 or 12 different Reddit posts about this. And then suddenly the news site started running with it because as soon as there is a thing on Reddit, they have to. They have to. Yeah.

Sorry about it. They didn't have to research anything. They can just be like, right? User blank says blank.

Yeah. But I don't know if you've seen any of the pictures of it. No. But it's this little rubber spacer in the shape of a switch cartridge with a googly eye in the middle of it.

And the rubber spacer is black so that if you're just looking from the bottom of the switch case, it looks like there is a black switch card in there. And if you shake it, you hear the googly eye move. So it sounds like there's a switch card moving around. But then you open it up and it's just a googly eye inside of a rubber spacer.

And the perfect theory is that somebody is steaming these open, replacing them, and then resealing it. But it is happening before it even hits the retail level. Weird. So it is somewhere in distribution or in manufacturing.

Somebody is doing this. Or it is a bunch of people who bought these spacers in Google. It's like to be agreed to be like posting it on Reddit. Yeah.

Both oddly equally probable. Yeah. And both interesting enough to talk about. So yeah.

Lenovo Legion Go S announced for $4.99 with native SteamOS support. Also, Valve will make SteamOS available in beta for anyone who wants to install it on any device. These are both good moves. I like seeing this.

This is more diversity. This is more competition. This is non-Windows handhelds being made, which I also like. And the new Legion Go is also going to have a Windows version, which I think is $100 more.

Yeah. And so more options are more gooderer. It's more good. Nintendo 4 Sanhandron Game Guides have announced an officially licensed Mega Man 1 Game Guide that's coming out.

I think it's on Kickstarter now. Yeah, I believe so. I was on the Patreon for a couple of hand-drawn game guys before they got shut down by Nintendo. Really cool stuff.

Like I want to buy it because I want to support this. And I want to see more of this. But I don't really care to have a Mega Man 1 guide. It's kind of like my least favorite Mega Man.

It is the early Black Sheep entry. My hope is that this leads to a Mega Man 2, 3, 4 guide, which would be really cool. If they could do an omnibus of all of the 8-bit Mega Man it's all hand-drawn. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. A new browser-based Doom mod places the game inside an art gallery where you sip a wine while observing exhibits. It's cute. The headline that somebody had posted in our chat for this was a new gentrified Doom quote.

I like that Doom Guy in it has little glasses. So he looks fancy for the glasses. He's sophisticated. Yeah.

Finally, Nintendo and Lego have announced a Lego Game Boy to release this October. I'm excited that the idea, I don't think I'll be excited that the price Lego inflation is a real deal. Yeah. Probably going to be 300.

That's what I guess. If it's like regular Game Boy size, I could see it. I think someone in the chat was saying 150 or less. Even that seems high.

If it was like 50 bucks instant buy for me. If it's over $100, I don't know if I need a Lego Game Boy that bad. If it's 50 bucks, that would be the size of a key chain. Yeah.

Which brings us to our top of the hand, which is Namco. Namco. For synopsis, Saturn put the entire Scott Pilgrim quote. Hey, no, Pac-Man.

Well, Pac-Man was originally called Pac-Man. I'm not going to read the whole thing. I did leave out the response to that first line, where he says, Hey, you know Pac-Man? And she says, I know of him.

Yeah. Which I almost included that because that's my favorite part of that one. I know of him. As far as initial thoughts, Namco is one of those companies that really didn't matter to me until they were Bandai Namco.

Bizarre to me. Yeah. That's what I started losing interest to know. Namco was not I was not a Pac-Man fan.

I was not around for the Golden Age of the arcades. I missed a lot of their 90s stuff. I just, they just kind of went past me. And when they became Bandai Namco is when, you know, what was that early, early odds?

I know we'll talk about it at some point. It was like 2006. Yeah, so that was 11th grade for me. So yeah, you feel all of you?

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, like I knew about, again, I knew of Pac-Man. You know, I played some Pac-Man.

I was like, cool, Pac-Man, Namco, yeah, all right. But that was just kind of it. I didn't think much about Golden Age era arcade companies or characters very much. Video game very much started with NES era and later stuff for me.

Bio-6 and Namco was very much the Socaloper people. Yeah. And that's what they have been in my life. Yeah.

But yeah, so like I grew up with Pac-Man. We had a Atari 2600 hooked up when I was a kid pretty much all the time. Miss Pac-Man was a regular, that was probably the most common game that was left in the Atari, if nobody was playing anything else specifically. But I didn't really start to realize how influential Namco was as a company until they started to release those Namco Museum collections in the late 90s.

And that's when I started looking into the rest of their games. And that's also incidentally when I started playing around the game a lot. And so getting to go back and experience a lot of Namco's heyday through through main while simultaneously seeing the release of things like Tekken and Clineau and whatnot was a neat little dichotomy. Like I saw the Namco arcades and I remember being like, those are neat.

And it's neat that they all line up together on a shelf. Yeah. But that was it. I still to this day regret that I didn't get all the Namco Museum on PS1 because each of them had one of the letters of Namco on it.

So they would all spell out Namco if you had all five of them. And I'm still upset that I couldn't get them all. I have volumes one and three. Two, four, and five are all like $2.50, $300 these days.

They really just kind of missed me before the merger. And I guess really like post arcade stuff pre-Bendai Namco merger. Tekken was a thing there, but I didn't do that either. Kadamari.

Yeah, I played Katamari. Well, no, maybe I don't remember. Honestly, I don't know. I could have.

I might have. Who knows? Namco, Biograph for Information, founded June 1st, 1955. In Tokyo, Japan, it was founded by Masai Nakamura.

It dissolved March 31st, 2006. Saturn, tell us about the early days and the founding of Namco. So Namco was originally founded as Nakamura Manufacturing by Masai Nakamura in June of 1955. He was born in 1925.

He graduated from your comments to technology back in 48, which is way before video games. Yeah, I did look at him. He had a degree in shipbuilding, which is a thing, I guess. Yeah, it is.

I feel like there's a fancier name for that. I used to do tech support for a shipbuilding company. And they just referred to themselves as shipbuilders. So down to Earth, the shipbuilding industry seems to be.

World War II, Cosims Change Careers. I don't know if you know this or not, but World War II was tough on Japan a little bit. And there's a lot of career changes going on. And he worked at his father's.

I love this. He worked at his father's shotgun repair business before founding Namco. I would think that World War II would have been when shipbuilding was at its peak in Japan. Yeah, I didn't read into the exact- The military shipbuilding is really the money right now.

I think what the way I read it was, he was like, I don't want to fucking do that. That's the dangerous works. I don't know. I didn't read into his exact reasoning.

Why? I didn't read any idea of him working at his father's shotgun repair business is the most Texas Texan thing I've ever heard. That sounded very hillbilly. So knock him out of Texas and it's hard.

I'll give you that one. Quit building boats to go work at your daddy's shotgun repair shop. Anyway, go ahead, please. So the company started by installing two mechanical rocking horse rides on a department store rooftop, which is the most common video game company origin story.

Yeah, I know that it was probably a finished roof that you were allowed to go on. But it sounds like they just put two random child's amusements on the roof of a building. And we're like, I don't know. Bill, get up there.

I got to fix the shotgun. You go up on the roof with a horse. Yeah, you take a little Timmy up there and run them horses on the roof. Wow, I fixed this 12 gauge.

Hey, Paul, can we put a couple of them there? Horse is up on the roof. Yep. I reckon we can.

Anyway, I'm sorry. Company did see some early success with amusement machines at small department stores across Tokyo. And they ultimately found themselves as one of the premier Japanese amusement device companies alongside Taito and the two companies that would go on to become Sega. And a move to expand the business.

Knock them around, sign an exclusive deal with Disney to produce rides with Disney characters, which was also something that intended early on to make some money. And they also opened their own production plants to compete with Taito and Sega who were already producing their own equipment prior to this. Taito was either repairing other companies' equipment or outsourcing their production. Yeah.

And it's kind of like second fiddle to these bigger companies. Right. And their early self-developed electromechanical successes included an ultra-man-based shooting gallery, as well as a submarine-themed game called torpedo launcher that would later be sold by Sega as periscope. And I was looking into this torpedo launcher periscope thing.

Looks like the only copyright is held by Sega, but there's evidence that Namco produced it before Sega. And there has some controversy over whether or not Sega just straight up stole it from Namco. Yeah. Because periscope was pretty foundational in early Sega, isn't it?

Oh, yeah. It was a big deal. It was a huge thing for Sega. And there was some discussion as to whether or not it was just stolen by Sega.

Or if it was just a coincidental, they both came up with a similar idea around the same time. Yeah. But by 71, Namco had grown to 10 employees, or what would become Namco had grown to 10 employees. And Knock them around again using the name Namco on several of their machines.

And they would eventually fully rebrand to Namco by 77. Yeah. I was looking at their original logo. It's just like a little derpy cartoon horse.

Yeah. Which I love. Oh, yeah. I wish they still used it.

I can't tell if it's got its tongue dangling out of its mouth or if its mouth is open. Right. Well, I like to imagine it's a tongue dangle. It just makes it look extra super derpy.

Extra derpy in charming. So I do enjoy their old logo. After this is there are some early acquisition activities. Yeah, this is when you get into their video gamey stuff.

So before we get to that, I do want to slide track slightly to talk about Atari Japan. Yes. In 73 Atari had formed their Japanese division, Atari Japan. And within a year, poor sales led to the president of Atari Japan just abandoning his job.

Just stopped showing up. Silent quitting in the 70s. It was a thing. So the person who was brought on to replace him was Hideo K, sorry, Hideyuki Nakajima, who would go on to run Atari Japan.

And rather than trying to fix this collapsing Japanese division, Atari just immediately started looking for a buyer. Somebody buy our Japanese division. We no longer write this. Well, there's someone here to broker this deal.

Please purchase it. Yeah, because they're going to leave too. And so Sega and Taito both shot down the idea of buying Atari Japan. They wanted nothing to do with it at this point.

So Nakamura came in and was like, you know what? I will buy it for $1 million. And then they're like, great. And then as soon as they're about to sign the deal, he was like, never mind.

I will not buy it for $1 million. I will give you $550,000 upfront. OK, but we want another $4 million a year for the next three years. OK, whatever.

So they come to a deal. But I just thought it was funny that he comes to them with this one price. As they're signing, he's like, just kidding. Never mind.

But they made their money in the end. So that's fine. So this was Namco's introduction to the video game market. Prior to this, they didn't make video games.

They bought Atari Japan. And now suddenly they're making video games in 74. And this is early on. Because two years ago, it was wrong.

Real early. And the person who was at this time the head of Atari Japan, he stayed on it. Namco, to oversee what was a Atari Japan Namco arcade division. And initially, Namco just distributed Atari's games with some mild successes.

But then once Space Invaders became a thing, once Taito completely changed the market with Space Invaders, Namco realized they need to start developing arcade games. They need to make their own video games in-house. And their first arcade game was released in 78. And it was called GB.

And it's got a little QB on the cover art. And it was just basically a take-on breakout designed by Toro Iwatani, who would later go on to MacPagman. The game underperformed, but still kind of established Namco as somebody that arcade owners could buy games from. Yeah.

Put their foot in the door. And their first big hit was in 79 with Galaxium. I've heard of this. Yes.

It was one of the first games with RGB graphics. So with tile maps and with score bonuses, we talked about it on our Galgab, so back in episode 4.57. We did. That's what I heard of this.

It was the first time you ever heard of Galaga before then. So around this time, Namco formed an American office, which was also headed by Huyuki Nakajima. So he was heading their Japanese arcade division and their American division. And the entire purpose of the American office was to manufacture and distribute their electromechanical games in the West, not their arcade games.

They didn't have the equipment to make the arcade games in the West. So they signed deals with Bali Midway to produce Galaxium. And they also signed deals with Atari and others to get their games out in the West. Right.

Distribution. But specifically, the deal with Bali Midway led to many Namco games being distributed by Midway outside of Japan. It was a very close partnership between Midway and... We did a Midway episode, did we?

Did we do that? I don't think we've done knots. We did Williams who bought Midway at some point. That's why it's familiar.

Yeah. So they had some early successes, but they wanted to diversify specifically Torio. With Tani, wanted to make a game that wasn't just shooting things, because that's basically what everything was post-space invaders for a while. That notion offends me.

I'm a big fan of games that are not shooting things. So I'm with him. How dare you, Saturn? I can't believe this betrayal.

So we wanted to make his non-shooting game. And he also wanted a game that could be enjoyed, quote, even by women. Oh boy. All right.

It was the 80s, huh? All right. Yeah. Party on.