What was your first experience working in the game industry?
Oh, I did a – what was that game called? It was actually a really interesting game, had a jester in it for PlayStation 1…Pandemonium yeah, I did that game. I wrote on it. It’s an interesting, interesting experience, we made a game that seemed like a 3D game, but it’s a 2D game, and it was a side-scrolling kind of game, but there was stuff we could do with it, we tried, right?
Really, I think where I kind of stood out was when I worked with Amy Hennig on the Legacy of Kain stuff, Soul Reaver. I think that changed the way that people looked at how games can be written, because we wrote about Gnosticism, the snake that eats his own tail. We did that.
Legacy of Kain, Blood Omen stuff, whatever it was called, was downstairs. There’s an interesting tale, because you go back in time, back to then, the two floors were fighting. The upstairs and downstairs, and it was driving us crazy. There should have been no reason for it, but people would sabotage each other’s stories. Egos got in the way. This was the game business when the game business was going Girls Gone Wild. It was crazy, I’ll never forget. I remember Amy [Hennig[ trying really hard to unify this, and she asked me to go talk to – there was a great producer called Rose Sandoval – and Rose and Amy had talked, and I remember they asked me if I wanted to go downstairs to see if they wanted to bring me on to do the writing on their project down there, because they felt that at that point maybe it would actually smooth things out and we’d have a really cohesive project. And I’m like, nah. I remember when we finished working out the story for Soul Reaver, I never had a headache like it. Literally, we were fixing it and it took us maybe two to three days. It was the biggest headache I had ever had in my life.
And then your ending got cut off, right?
It did get cut off, yeah. We were very disappointed in that, but then I went downstairs and I was interviewed for the job by a twenty-two-year-old kid who wanted to be the writer. That’s how mad that was.
So you feel there’s a lot of infighting in the games industry?
There was, then. I’ve seen all kinds of stuff just get messed up and sabotaged. But I don’t think so now, I think they’ve got their systems down.
How was it working with Amy Hennig? She seems like an incredibly creative person and has done a lot in the industry, so I imagine she was great to work with.
Yeah, very clear, very strong person. Amy was sort of living that experience I think, where she was not of the demographic everyone wanted her to be, a woman working in the gaming industry. I think that was a thing, that people would look at her sideways for, which, of course, is bloody absurd, right? It’s dumber than dumb, right? Because she’s either brilliant or she’s not, and she’s brilliant, accomplished, and amazing. But that’s how the game industry was around the mid-to-late ‘90s.
How was the transition from working on comics featuring the Hulk to working on The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction video game?
It was a smooth transition because I was my own story editor. I could write what I wanted to.
They respected the fact that I had written the book. I was allowed a bit of leeway to do something really interesting with the story. I also remember that, I think the reason why I won them over, is because they initially asked me to come out there to interview to write it as well. Eric [Holmes], as much as he was a big fan of my work, he didn’t give me the job because of who I am, he ran me through my paces, and I loved that. Because that means that he really protected his work and he was looking out for the content.
So we talked it through and I told them what was wrong with their first game [Hulk 2003] in about ten seconds. If you’re the Hulk, you’re supposed to initiate combat, you’re supposed to be the one that beats everyone up, but in the first game you just went through a tunnel and you were attacked.
But it was a great experience. I got to do something interesting and we felt like we pushed boundaries in terms of some elements of storytelling at that point. First of all, it was make it fun, and when it came out it was the number one rated superhero game at that point. You have to understand where it was in the timeline of the superhero content we got. It wasn’t when the Marvel movies were massive, they had happened, but the Ang Lee Hulk movie hadn’t done that well.
How did you get involved with Twisted Metal Black?
Dave called me up, Dave Jaffe. Big fan of my Spider-Man work and he called me up.
So you just got a random call, “Hey, I read your comics, will you come work on this video game with me?”
Yeah, and people knew that I worked in games as well, so…
I love The Darkness. The comics are great, but a lot of people love the first game. Can you tell me how work on that one went?
That was one that was a really interesting situation for me. I had written The Darkness, I had written the comic book, and it had really struggled. It had done about forty-nine issues and, to some extent, there wasn’t much going on in it. Hard to read and to know what the story was, just meandering. Dale Keown and I came in and with our first issue we came in and did something that really meant something. It was about grief, and it was about family, and it was very much – I look back, I look at what I do, what I’ve written about, and it was very much about me and my life and things that I’ve understood. So this was about grief, and about losing Jenny, and it was about not being able to come back from it. Wanting a family, and never being able to forgive yourself because she’s gone, because you wanted a family and needed something that could hold you together, and you just didn’t have it. So for Jackie, he had the mob, that was his family and he wanted to protect it.
So we got that and we had done so well with it that I got this call to go over and write the game. I was very much my own approval. I got there, I was the license holder’s representative and I was also the writer. And we wrote what was essentially a love story. We really did write a love story in the form of a mobster with demon tentacles in his head.
I think we had a few triumphs in that game that had never been done. There were just things that bugged me, every game that I’ve ever worked on I’ve brought in an element of game design. For The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, I believe I was Vivendi Universal’s first person on their credits who got two credits: writer and gameplay consultant, because I always wanted to bring new things to it, and I’d always ask really challenging questions. Can we do this? Can we do that? And that was pretty cool, it was pretty interesting.
I got over there and one of the things we did I think was so amazing, was I sort of insisted that – when you play a game, you are Jackie Estacado, Brad Pitt is not playing Jackie Estacado, you’re playing Jackie Estacado, right? And so I got there and I spoke to the developers, and they were just amazing. You know, they were the people that did Chronicles of Riddick, Starbreeze, and they were just really good, a great creative team. They bought into the idea and we did this scene that I will always be proud of, and it’s been seen as one of the most impactful scenes in games, been listed in some Top 10s. And it’s about how you fall in love with her, you go into her house, and we used story to move the project forward. Which, that had not been done in games up until that point. It was very influential I think in things like BioShock, realizing you can do story with game. So you go into her house and we had sort of like an emotional thing we did, where she would talk to you – and you know, you couldn’t pull a gun in her house – you have to talk to her. She would say hey, and you’d be given two choices, lie to her or tell her the truth and it immediately made you feel something. Games had not done that. So if you lied to her, she’d say, what have you done? You’d say, oh, just a bad day at work, and if you tell her the truth, and she’d say, well, Uncle Franky is just a mobster. And she wouldn’t believe you, and it’d always lead you to the last bit. And the last bit of that sequence is she’d ask you, is there something you want to tell me? And you only get one choice, and your choice is, tell her that you love her. So you press the X button to tell her that you love her, and your character doesn’t. You don’t ever get to tell her that you love her, and twenty minutes later she’s killed.
And another thing that had an impact was – I wanted people to fall in love, with her, whether you are male, female, whatever your sexuality or gender is, you have to fall in love with Jenny, because you are Jackie Estacado – so we had this thing where you could win an achievement if you sat on a sofa with her and watched To Kill A Mockingbird. [Laughs] What I knew it would do, if you gamified that, you create a currency for falling in love, and it worked, and I think that was the first game that ever did something like that.
There’s actually a moment in that game that was, just really meaningful and emotional for me. I’m from a family that gets killed really early in the wars, so you know, a bunch of my grandparents didn’t know their fathers, never did, and it reverberates through our family all this time. And there’s great uncle Charlie who got lost in the Somme, underneath the mud somewhere. So I put them all in the game. And when I got the first build, it was like 3 o’clock in the morning, and when I got to play it, I walked across No Man’s Land and there were my great grandfathers, my great uncle, all. I just hung out with them for a few hours. I didn’t want to leave, just wanted to hang out with them.
How much did you have to do with the sequel?
Yeah, I wrote the sequel, and again I think we triumphed, but I think we absolutely lost. They changed the bloody ending. They messed it up.
Really? The cliffhanger sequel where they introduced the Angelus?
I didn’t write a cliffhanger. They just introduced it, completely gratuitous, that’s not what I wrote. It’s a shame. I felt we had a beautiful ending. It was about forgiveness and about letting people go. I want to write stuff that’s beautiful, that means something, and we blew it. We had something that really meant something at the end of that story.
Do you think we’ll ever get a third Darkness game?
No. Because the game was too quick and it ruined the franchise. It was really unlucky, really ended the franchise because it didn’t end in a way people could see it – it just didn’t end. We had something, I promise you, was just such a beautiful story at the end, and because we didn’t end it with an emotional feeling – a thing that means something – we blew it.
Do you want to know what the ending was?
Please.
Well, I felt like what would happen is that he doesn’t know how to forgive himself for what’s happened to [Jenny], and there she is, she’s caught in Hell. He needs to trap the Darkness, trap it inside him, and he finds her and she’s impaled upside down on a St. Andrew’s cross, and she’s being tortured and every element of the torture is a thing he feels responsible for. It’s his guilt is what keeps her there and he cannot let her go. So what he does is, he finds a way to take her place and be there forever. And she manages to leave, and it remains on him. He knows that because he cannot leave, he has an eternity of torment coming, but it doesn’t matter to him because he’s trapped The Darkness in Hell forever. As he closes the doors, The Darkness begins to scream inside of him and he begins to smile. Would have been a great ending, but we blew it.
Do you think a Darkness movie could work?
It could work, it’s a great character.
Are you working on any current video game projects?
Yeah, I’m working on a lot of stuff, man. Not big console game stuff. I’m working on some NFT gaming projects, a lot of different new media projects. I’m working across lots and lots of different media. I’ve got my own company, I’ve got my NFT projects I did, and I’ve also got a documentary that I’m making.
Oh, what’s the documentary about?
Well, the documentary is unfortunate. It’s about toxic fandom. We were involved in helping a fan here in Atlanta make a film called Axanar, a very notorious Star Trek film. The guy had raised about two million dollars or so to make his film and never delivered it. We ran into him, we didn’t really know, so we offered to help him and this is the ultimate, no act of kindness goes unpunished. Turns out this guy is a many-time, multiple-litigious guy. … We were exposed to him, and once you could see his behavior, we sort of said, no, you can’t behave like that. So he fired us and then sued me.
I think creators are under attack, constantly, and I feel that it’s wrong. I felt it was wrong from the beginning and it’s time for someone to take a stand. So we are making a documentary about this form of toxic fandom, it’s very much about cultism. The premise I suppose is: what happens if you walk in the door and the first lie that they tell you is, it’s nice to meet you. What happens to us as a society when you’re not prepared for narcissistic psychopaths? We’re not prepared for that, you don’t think it’s real until it happens. And that’s who we ran into. A person with clear mental health issues in that regard, in my opinion. So we said, we have to shine some light on this. Because this is getting out of hand, and you can draw a very straight line from a lot of these behaviors in fandom to like QAnon and the Capital invasion I think. A lot of these cognitive biases are in it, it’s a fascinating story. It’s also really really frustrating, it’s very expensive.
We’re raising money for it now, if people are interested. It’s called Into the Wormhole documentary. We hope to have it out in May of next year. We’ve shot a lot of it, there’s a new trailer going up. We just put out a new trailer about this gentleman’s adventures in the prop industry. Because, you have to understand, in many ways, who it was who walked in the door to get 1.7 million dollars, if you knew who it was that walked in the door, that would have changed the narrative. This had been going on way before the Axanar project. And so, once we started going into it, we actually retitled it Into the Wormhole, because I could not believe, the rabbit hole, the depth of what was actually in front of me, and it continues to surprise me every time I get a revelation. I’m like, this is ridiculous. It’s the most fascinating story, I promise you, and also awful.
I think that creators the last few years have really come under attack, because of access on the internet. It has really hurt people. So now my family and I are under attack, we’re being sued by somebody that has a 30 to 40-year history of this behavior, who is in multiple lawsuits at the same time. That’s what he does. He doesn’t have a job, he does lawsuits. The idea that you could be attacked by somebody who has passed the bar in his younger days, so now he has a background in law, and he can just use it to attack and hurt people, this is something I think we should all look at. I’m trying to take a stand, and I’ve done it before. It hurts, it’s painful, but I think it’s time for us to put an end to this kind of behavior.
Is there anything, games, or comic series, you want to work with in the future?
All my own IP. That’s it, now. I’ve got so much stuff I’m doing anyway. I don’t need to go work on a comic book character or something like that. I don’t care. I don’t need it, never did, really. I was always a bit of an outsider.
You mentioned NFTs earlier and you wanted to tell me a bit about them and gaming?
So people misunderstand NFTs. It went through its thing where people were like, that guy sold a piece of art for 69 million dollars, that’s crazy. Let’s go draw art and put it out as an NFT. That’s not what it is. That’s what the thing was then for a month or two. Frankly, the sustainability of NFTs is in a number of places, it will be games, it will be that it is verifiable and on the blockchain. You can own an NFT and rent it to someone, you can resell it to someone. You can gain value because of its rarity, you can do all kinds of things. But what you can do is you can use NFTs to verify things, you can verify shipping, so you know where it came from, it’s on the blockchain, you know where it lives. You know it left here and it arrived here in the same state.
NFTs are going to change everything and people don’t yet realize what they are. They’re mutable assets. You can do a time travel story, if you wanted to do a story, and you can have the NFT reprogram itself twenty days after you put it out and now suddenly a scene is different and it can be a fantastic time travel story. You know? They are a revolution and they fit in with that sort of cryptocurrency that decentralizes currencies. It’s fascinating to me, I’m a guy who comes into these new media and I’m like, this has been great. We did one called Bitcoin Origins that did really well and now we’re working on some new ones. That’s what my company is concentrating on right now and I love it and we’re working on some animation stuff. We have the animated series of a project called Sidekick.
So what we’re doing at the moment is we’re working on the animated elements of the NFTs, we’re doing an NFT series with it, and it’s going to be amazing. The goal is to use that to build out the animation as well and move them across lots of different media and lots of different platforms. Think of NFTs as little computers in your pocket and they’re a new form of distribution, and then you’ll get it.
