Panic Podcast

Claire L. Evans: I was researching this piece on the history of FMVs And the impulse to like want to shoot a screen is kind of like the origin of the genre. Like the earliest pre arcade, pre-con FMVs were like these film projected sideshow attractions. In the 19th century, people would shoot guns at a paper screen that had animals projected on it. And the first Nintendo arcade game was like another kind of quick draw gun slinging game where you were shooting a 16 millimeter film strip.

So I don’t know what that means about what our ideal interaction is with games and with movies, but yeah, just shooting the TV and someone dies dies in there. Then it’s, yeah, it’s very Videodrome, actually.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, so if you don’t know a Videodrome, it’s a David Cronenberg sci-fi body horror film about a mysterious television signal that causes hallucinations

and that can ultimately be used for mind control. It’s kind of about the reality of television becoming more real than our existing reality and how the one influences and acts on the other… which brings us back to FMVs, or full motion video games.

Christa: Welcome to the Panic Podcast, a podcast about Portland’s Panic, but maybe not exactly. I’m Christa Mrgan. Join me as I follow the quirky subplots and surprising characters that round out Portland’s most lovable indie software, game publishing, and game-console-making company.

Christa Mrgan: So FMVs, full motion video games, interactive movies, interactive films. Whatever you wanna call them, this concept of fusing movies and video games has been around for a long time. And it makes so much sense on paper: wouldn’t it be cool if video games were more like films? And wouldn’t it be great to have more agency over what happens in movies the way you do in video games? But it turns out it’s not so easy to meld the two and very few FMVs or interactive films have actually worked well—either as games or as movies. But there are a few notable exceptions. and today I am talking with two creators who have managed to pull it off.

Sam Barlow: Hi, I’m Sam Barlow. I’m a game director and writer. I started out in kind of traditional commercial games and got to work on the Silent Hill franchise was kind of a, high spot. And in 2015, I released my first indie game, Her Story, and subsequent to that, Telling Lies and Immortality.

And you can kind of loosely group those as, being successful indie FMV games.

Christa Mrgan: Definitely! All three of Sam’s very cinematic games explore ideas of storytelling , unreliable narrators, memory, and truth through the mechanic of watching and analyzing video footage. In Her Story, you solve the mystery of a disappearance by searching through and watching clips of a suspect’s police interviews. Telling Lies expands upon that concept, with the player again, using keywords to search through video clips to uncover mysteries. Only this time, the footage is of secretly recorded conversations between four characters, and your goal is to determine who’s lying and why. And with Immortality, you’re exploring an archive of video clips from three unreleased films, as well as behind the scenes footage, piecing together both the films and the disappearance of the actress who starred in all of them. And just a heads up that there are some light spoilers for Sam’s games in this episode. And the same goes for Blippo+.

Claire L. Evans: Hi, I’m Claire Evans I’m a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and most recently co-creator and writer of a game, which you could also kind of call an FMV game called Blippo+ for Playdate, and Nintendo and Steam.

Christa Mrgan: Blippo+ is like a cable TV simulator from another world, where you channel surf through a narrative that unfolds through the television shows and community message boards of planet Blip.

And Blippo+ is also now available on the Mac. 2026 is the year of gaming on the Macintosh.

So as people with much greater knowledge and obviously direct experience with FMVs, I mostly wanted to get Claire and Sam together for a chat and, and let them ask each other interesting questions. So that’s mainly what this episode is, with, of course, some explanatory asides and tangents from me, and I do throw out a few questions of my own. So I guess a good place to start is by asking: what makes a good, or at least compelling, FMV game?

Sam Barlow: That’s a fun question. I mean, what if the answer was that there aren’t any good ones or, or that it’s, it’s such a loaded fascinating concept and genre and history of video games.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah.

I think if you expand the definition of an FMV to include like anything that falls in that gray area between movies and games, like it’s a much more interesting genre than just thinking about like the CD rom nineties, like crunchy you know, video clip aesthetic, which is its own like compelling form and is like quite nostalgic and interesting.

But I, I think Sam is right, that no one really actually likes those games 'cause they were sort of like opportunistic in a way. They were just like a consequence of Hollywood trying to capitalize on video games making more money than films and like trying to jam two forms of media together that maybe, you know, it wasn’t coming from a place of looking at the affordances of what you can do with video and working from there.

And I think the most successful games of that era are the ones that are like kind of auteur- driven, you know, like Phantasmagoria or even Myst in a way. Are the ones that they’re like, it’s, they’re not trying to do Johnny Mnemonic the game or whatever. They’re just trying to do something genuinely new.

Sam Barlow: I am a big defender of Night Trap.

Christa Mrgan: Night Trap is an interactive movie or FMV game that was released for Sega CD in 1992. It’s kind of famous or infamous for a number of reasons, and we’ll get more into that in a minute, though we won’t go too deep. And I’ve linked to the My Life In Gaming documentary about it in the show notes, if you wanna know more.

But in the game or interactive movie, you control various surveillance video feeds and traps that are set up inside a mansion where some teen girls are staying the night, and your goal is to save them from a bunch of weird vampires who suck people’s blood using drills instead of their teeth.

Elizabeth: But Night Trap is also the deepest hole you can go down of " oh, this was a piece of tech being developed within like Hasbro, whatever, with Nolan Bushnell was involved on some level, and they originally looking at like the video cassette."

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, though it was eventually published by Sega on CD -ROM, The game grew out of a 1986 concept from Atari and Chuck E. Cheese founder Nolan Bushnell’s Company, Axlon. Called the Control Vision-- Codename NEMO-- it involved interleaving computer data with four video cassette tracks that could play simultaneously, allowing for cinematic branching path narratives. The toy company Hasbro invested in the technology, but ultimately decided that the control vision would be too expensive to ever gain wide acceptance for in-home use. So, the project was scrapped.

Sam Barlow: And this is like going back to Videodrome era when just the word “video” was the sexiest word, right?

You got James Woods and people using the word “video,” and it sounds so magical in a way that we probably have other words that people use similarly now, but, you know, so there was these people going, " video is magical."

And the people that made Night Trap were inspired-- They went and saw some immersive theater. So, you know, the extent to which, you know, games people were, are all like, oh, “Sleep No More”. You know, back in the day you had these people going to immersive theater and going, “oh, this is a way in which we could do something.”

And so that the kind of origin of Night Trap was going, oh, these stories where you can follow people to different parts of the theater, we could do that on video. 'cause they knew that they couldn’t actually have reactivity. And then at some point they were like, oh, it’s, it’s a horror thing. It’s a slasher thing. That gives us some affordances.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, at one point you were meant to be protecting a billionaire’s money and the teen girls from some ninjas, but they dropped the money part and then the ninjas became vampires. But Hasbro wanted to tone them down somewhat, which is what led to the vampires using drills instead of their teeth to suck blood, which honestly is kind of creepier?

And also incidentally, Night Trap is one of the games at the center of the 1993 US Senate hearings that led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB, the current video games rating board in North America.

Sam Barlow: And then it stopped being video and became CD ROMs.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. So after Hasbro scrapped the video cassette based technology of Control Vision, one of the team members bought the rights to Night Trap and formed a new company called Digital Pictures , and then worked with Sega to bring Night Trap to the new Genesis accessory, the Sega CD, five years after it was originally filmed.

Claire L. Evans: I weirdly think that Night Trap is kind of a like spiritual predecessor to some of your games. 'cause it, operates under the assumption that you are a voyeur rather than like the protagonist necessarily. And like you’re going through these like video feeds, which is a much more natural and intuitive way of navigating video than like getting it jammed, you know, in weird places in the game, which is, I mean Not to be presumptuous, but I feel like that’s what you do.

Like you find places where people are already kind of accustomed to an interaction with video. You know, there’s a familiarity there and then you can kind of build something around it rather than trying to like shoehorn it in.

Sam Barlow: Yeah, I mean the, the worst FMV games, the ones where they’re like, “oh, we have this existing concept of a systemic piece of gameplay which is fluid and has all this kind of analog juice, and we are gonna recreate that using canned pieces of video.” And this fun one’s like the sort of what was it, the Mad Dog games in the arcade where it’s like a light gun game and they can kind of detect that you shot in a part of the screen and then they’ll just cut to someone going, “ooooh!” And it’s kind of cool, but anything that involves sort of, you know, the, the more sort of real time action elements tends to be kind of, disappointing.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the term FMV is pretty broad actually, and can really refer to any game that features prerecorded live action video or even prerecorded animated video, like in the classic laser disc arcade game, Dragon’s Lair, though there are nuances and some debate around which games get classified as FMVs. And while we’re here: why are they called FMVs? Like why are we adding “full motion” as a qualifier before “video?” Well, it’s an artifact from the time before home game consoles were powerful enough to accommodate true video. So instead of video clips, game developers would use series of digitized photographs as sprites and play them sequentially. So they’d appear to animate, albeit with a somewhat jerky kind of early stop motion look. And that technique was known as “partial motion video,” hence the differentiator “full motion video.” But broadly speaking, an FMV could actually mean a few things. It could mean a video game with extensive cut scenes where you don’t really interact with the game’s video elements, and they don’t have much impact on your overall progress through the game. Or FMV could mean an interactive movie where you make decisions in the game based on the scenes you’ve watched.

Or it could mean a much more game-like experience where most of the actual gameplay involves viewing and interacting with the video elements. Night Trap falls into this last category.

Sam Barlow: I love Night Trap for that sense of going, “well hey, if we’re making a game out of video, let’s start with the assumption that you are watching and, and like, how do we now create gameplay out of watching?”

And I think partly Night Trap succeeds there, and then it massively fails when you have people going, “well, it’s a video game. We need to have game over. We need to have challenges.” And, and I think the big issue with Night Trap and a lot of games in that era was you have a lot of very linear content that you have an ability to sort of navigate in a sort of interesting way.

And where Night Trap stops working is if you game over, right? If you, if you don’t write down the secret code or what have you, then you just go back to the start of the game and now you’re watching it again. And at some point it becomes so repetitive in a way that is quite tedious.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah, there’s no fast-forward.

Sam Barlow: But, but they felt like they needed that kind of game over thing.

And I think when I was making Her Story and sort of unlocked this sort of extreme nonlinearity, it was like, well, hey, there isn’t this kind of forced death march of repetition, but when there is repetition, it’s interesting because you’re now rewatching and uncovering layers of a thing that in context now meets something different.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, in Her Story, rewatching certain clips might give you more context or new insights instead of just being something you have to slog through again because you failed.

But Sam wasn’t thinking about specifically avoiding the mistakes of Night Trap when he was working on Her Story. In fact, it didn’t even occur to him at first that what he’d created was an FMV game.

Sam Barlow: The first time I showed Her Story, the only time I showed Her Story in public before it came out was at a gaming show in London.

And a journalist sort of cornered me and was like, “what on earth made you want to bring back the FMV game?” And that was the first time I’d realized that’s what I was doing.

I’d sort of wandered into it through I guess like YouTube. You know, everyone had pivoted to video.

The sort of YouTube aesthetic was taking over. I was interested in the way in which kind of reality. Like what, was real at that point sort of meant it’s been filmed on a cell phone, right? So there was obviously an explosion of found footage stuff, which I think was in the air. So that was kind of what I was plugging into.

Not that I was like completely naive or ignorant. Like I think I, didn’t have enough money when the FMV thing blew up in the sort of nineties, I was not in a position to have a CD ROM drive. So it was always the cool thing that I would sort of look at magazines and be like, whoa, looks real.

Sam Barlow: Which is probably the best way to experience some of those original games. 'cause I was never actually having to play them. I was just looking at these photos going, “whoa.”

Claire L. Evans: Yeah.

Sam Barlow: So, you know, I knew that those things existed sort of subsequent to Her Story coming out, I educated myself much more and was like, geez, there were like hundreds of these things.

It was huge. And I think the sort of exciting realization to me was looking at this weird road that was not taken in video game development, but seeing what happened when you plugged FMV in was an explosion of genre. So you had legal games, erotic thrillers crime things, horror, psychological horror, like all of these genres that had not really existed or worked with traditional game graphics.

And a lot of it for me was these were genres where you needed character performance. You needed humans that. Were able have some level of subtext for those genres to work. So I was like, okay. It kind of makes sense that I stuck my foot.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah. Something you told me when we first talked last year, I think Sam, was that like by the, time you were making live action games, you’d already been directing like motion capture cinematics for a long time. So you knew how to work with actors. And I think that’s something we kind of forget when we’re talking about FMVs is that like even non FM v games have all these live action performances. Like beneath the surface. At some point in production, like there were people in a room yelling action and cut. And that’s been part of games like forever. Even the original Mortal Kombat, like has live performances. So I don’t know, I think like we’re kind of in an uncanny valley now where like CGIs gotten so good that it looks real.

And like in Hollywood, they’re shooting on the volume and they’re using game engines to do special effects. So the line between games and movies has been blurry for a long time and remains blurry.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it has. And while games and movies do continue to overlap more and more, back in the nineties, it seemed like FMVs were about to revolutionize the worlds of both film and video games. But they didn’t. And I think the main reason is that it’s really hard to make these kinds of video-based interactive experiences interesting and exciting, and not tedious and boring.

And I think the key to the success of Sam’s Games comes from his love and deep knowledge of both films and games and his approach to creating something that asks the right questions from a game design perspective.

Sam Barlow: Rather than worrying about how do we not create problems or, how do we sort of make sure we’re not confusing or boring people? It’s sort of starting at the other end of going, what does the player desire?

What is exciting about this? If I’m sat watching a piece of footage other than shooting people, what do I want to do? Well, you know, if you’re sat at home and you’re watching a mystery and you have ideas, it’s oh, I want to somehow express that. Or if we’re not even talking explicitly about a mystery.

And to some extent Her Story wasn’t entirely consciously thinking about this. 'cause I was coming from this initial jumping off point of the detective genre, but certainly midway through, and straight into Telling Lies. I was very much like, "okay, this is about taking the act of watching and going, how do I make this expressive?

How do I make this kind of more of a meaningful loop?" And so finding ways that whilst watching you can express yourself. And obviously there are really trivial ways of doing that, of going I will stop watching, right? Or I’m gonna flip channels or something. But sort of more and more as we’ve gone on with the Moviola in Immortality of going, I want you to actually have some fun, tactile interaction with the footage.

Slow it down, actually sort of appreciate how kind of fun and sensual it is as an editor to absorb that performance and understand how much is being captured to then having sort of the really kind of chunky gameplay interactions of being able to search and discover new pieces of narrative and clips or in Immortality, being able to touch anything on the screen and immediately generate a match cut.

Those are extremely powerful, free tools

you understand as a player like, “oh, I could type anything in Her Story, or, oh, in Immortality, at some point I can click anything on the screen and it’s gonna do something with it.”

So you then realize that this thing that I’m doing is very personal and subjective and expressive, and then the thing I’m trying to do on the game side is make sure that these are meaningful, right? Like there’s a version of Immortality that was always like the backup version, if nothing worked, which was, hey, even if clicking on a thing is just a random button, even if it’s just like a fruit machine that gives you a new piece of footage, that’s still gonna be fun, right?

If we just keep throwing cool stuff at you that’s at least enjoyable on a level, but the point where you feel like, oh, no, I, what I’m doing is meaningful, I’m really interested in this character. I do feel like I can dig further into this character’s story. Oh, I’m detecting some imagery that’s repeating. If I click on that, I’m gonna kind of dig into that further.

Like being able to actually feel like you have some purchase and there is some kind of meaning to those interactions, I think then sort of elevates it.

The cheesy thing I always say is that, so the traditional film is interactive. A Hitchcock movie. Is interactive because Hitchcock is playing in your imagination. He’s setting you up, he’s showing you pieces of information that he knows are gonna generate reactions from you. And you know, so if you put someone that had none of the cultural context or was an Android or something in front of a Hitchcock movie, it’s not gonna work, right?

So there is something that you are having to bring to it. And so for me it’s well, given that we have actually a feedback loop, given that I can use my fingers to do things, how do you actually push even further in that direction?

Christa Mrgan: And the act of taking in visual imagery and just processing and analyzing it is in itself a form of agency, whether you’re viewing a film or more actively searching for clues in a gameplay context.

Claire L. Evans: What I love about watching old movies is like how much information you can glean from what’s going on in the background. You know, like how much you can learn about how the world used to be, not just from the performances and from the content of the film, but know, oh, people are going to a restaurant and that’s what a restaurant looks like, or this is how they use the payphone. You know, you get a call in a restaurant and a guy comes with a little silver plate and gives you a note. These are all these kind of context cues as to what the world used to be like. And I think that’s the fun thing about interacting with video. And I think we have this latent literacy.

Everyone’s able to read those clues and to understand things and to compare the past and the present and to compare what is being said versus what’s being shown. Like There’s a lot of layers to visual media. And they’re only getting more and more of them as we like, navigate this very video driven world that we live in now. it’s not necessarily agency but it is a kind of empowerment that the viewer or the player has to dive really deep into an image and, and like really find out how much information an image can contain.

Sam Barlow: I think it, the, not just like the visual literacy, but just sort of the, level of intelligence of the audience in terms of what they’re able to take and just the sheer number of images they have in their head that have, you know, they’ve been exposed to.

So just that level of literacy, I think is, extremely developed. And I think that the trick, especially with something like Immortality was going, look, if you’re a cinephile. Or film student, you are gonna stop and go frame by frame in these movies and you’re gonna explicitly, consciously start talking about these things that you might otherwise be absorbing.

And, and sort of the trick of Immortality is going, oh, we have this game mechanic. It’s a mystery. And so this is why you’re rewinding and rewatching clips again and again, and noticing things. And it’s, you know, it’s, it is partly a trick to slide you into the position of being the cinefile who is appreciating it on a deeper level.

I can remember when we had a prototype of the game and we’re using clips from some reference movies for the prototype. And I think we had it was like Black Narcissus and then Klute and then Eyes Wide Shut which was really hard 'cause I was like, will this game work if we’re not using masterpieces of cinema?

Claire L. Evans: I wanna play that game! That sounds fun.

Sam Barlow: There was, and I remember there was one clip from Eyes Wide Shut that I must have now seen thousands of times in testing some of the stuff. 'cause we had it all tacked up with all the things you could click and it would do match cuts of Tom Cruise taking masks off and stuff.

But on, on the like 50th time, I rewound and watched this clip, I started to notice background actors doing things and, and whole sequences within this movie that I had not seen. 'cause you know, the first time I saw it, I’m just watching Tom Cruise and I’m worried, oh, Tom Cruise is headed to the orgy. Oh, this is dramatic.

And, and then watching it again and just seeing, oh, there is this whole set of background actors, there’s a guy that takes the cloak and the way he folds the cloak up is really cool. And it’s like, oh, this is just neat. Like Taking all the meat off the bone of these visual images.

Claire L. Evans: great.

Sam Barlow: but what I wanted to ask you about on Blippo is, so you have the channel switching. And you have a a relatively short loop. I’m not sure how long it takes for all the, the, the content to loop. And it’s just about perfectly placed so you don’t feel like it’s tedious to have to wait for it to come back round again.

But there’s enough that it compels you to be like, oh, I’ll go off whatever. So you already have that thing of like the, the sort of repetition, but in a way that is interesting. And it completely, I once psychoanalyze myself and, realized that 90% of why I’m making these games is 'cause I had a little TV in my bedroom when I was a teenager that had a dial to move between channels.

And, you know, the experience back then is exactly like, and I love Blippo for this of you tune in halfway through, right? And And, and I think early on when someone was asking me about Her Story, I’m like, well, how does this work? If the players jumping in and out points of the story, this will be incoherent.

And I was like, Hey, growing up I would tune in halfway through an episode of NYPD Blue and I couldn’t rewind, but it usually took me five to 10 seconds to completely understand everything that was happening, right? Like there’s, the way in which like a hologram has every angle in, you know, there’s that, I dunno,

Claire L. Evans: I think I know what you mean.

Sam Barlow: the, the, the science of holograms.

You, you kind of, or like a DNA, right? every piece of you contains your DNA. There’s something about dropping into halfway through an episode of NYPD Blue and I can pretty quickly realize who the suspect is, who the goodies are, who the baddies are, where we are at dramatically in the confrontation between these people.

And that is exciting as a way of consuming a story because it does lean into your imagination. It does activate all of these things that we are designed to find pleasure in as humans. 'cause we’re supposed to be good at reading each other and inferring patterns and stuff. So you have all that juice in Blippo, but then the thing that is sort of the, the extra Playdate layer on there is the fact that you gotta wait till next week that you have this schedule.

And it reminds me a little bit of it was the least successful of their games and I think it, it broke them slightly. But Simogo made this game Sailor’s Dream, which was the, I think they did Year Walk and then Device 6, and then they were like, “Hey, everyone loves these kind of cool, ornate, beautiful puzzle things we’re making. How about we make something less puzzle-y that is just leaning more into everything else about it?” And they made it this game, Sailor’s Dream. And it had this thing where every day of the week, the content would be different and you had to tune in at certain hours to hear certain things. And it was really, really beautiful.

It definitely feels with Blippo, like this idea of on a level you’re asking for more effort from the audience, right? In a way that is not how things work now.

Claire L. Evans: That’s the privilege of working with Panic. don’t know. I, we love, I love friction. Like I love designing an experience that people are gonna ha have to like really kind of work for a bit. It’s gonna be rewarding, but I, same like I grew up with the kind of television that you didn’t necessarily get to jump ahead or behind you just watch what you watched and you might miss part of the story.

But also television at that era was written that you could jump into it 10, 15 minutes late and catch everything up. Like it was quite reiterative in a way. And it was all contained in, in what you were watching. part of that is just like it’s a writing thing. It’s like, how can we subtly underline the important points over and over again so that they’re not flying over the viewer’s head, but they’re not too redundant.

You have to be creative about that. That’s just, that’s a fun writing challenge. But yeah, we talk about Blippo being non demand. That’s the terminology we use. And the fact that it’s being broadcast in real time is totally just reverse engineered from the Playdate season model.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, yeah, if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably already know this, but just in case: for each of Playdate’s two seasons of games, new games arrive on your device each week. Of course there are also hundreds of other games available at any time via the official Playdate store called Catalog, or you can get them from Itch or other places, but the season model was designed specifically to create this experience of getting new surprise games each week.

Claire L. Evans: It was just like, we have this amazing opportunity to do something really weird and like to reach a group of people all at once and to give them a shared experience, which I think we, that’s so lacking in our culture.

Like we have so few things that we’re all experiencing at the same time. And that’s why like you know, when there’s a major, at least, I mean I live in Los Angeles, whenever there’s like a police car chase, like everyone in town stops and watches it. Like even still Now, not great. But I.

I think it speaks to our hunger for like experiencing something together and not knowing what’s gonna happen. And that’s like really what we wanted to build. It’s been a little bit tricky trying to like, create the Nintendo and the Steam version because that one is gonna be more self-contained. We can’t really do that outside of the Playdate universe, I think we figured out a good convention for that and we’ll see.

Sam Barlow: Yeah, I know. It’s, it’s weird trying to explain to my kids what moments in entertainment used to be like, Hey, I grew up when we had three channels and everyone was watching the same thing. And, even though we have so much more penetration now, knowing that actually things were bigger then, and landed in ways that they can’t now even, you know, even when something like squid game happens.

You see some of the slightly inflated figures that are not entirely accurate, but it, doesn’t quite feel like the conversation. And then, and then we don’t even have places to talk about these things anymore, right? That’s been the big shift. Like when Her Story came out, we still had forums and social media was kind of pleasant mostly.

And, you know, a big part of the success of Her Story was people were still playing it and discussing it months after it came out. and the forums would have posts near the top on the front page that were always staying up there 'cause people would keep kind of adding to them. and now it really does feel like a thing can come out and blow up and it’s gone before you’ve even had a chance to talk to anyone about it.

or everyone’s slightly outta sync in how they’ve been appreciating it and experiencing it, and you’re like, oh, I don’t wanna tell someone, I don’t wanna talk about X, Y, Z. 'cause they haven’t seen episode three yet, yeah.

Claire L. Evans: I get that so much. Coming from music, it’s just always been something that we’ve accepted as inevitable that you could spend years working on a record and put it out into the world. And if it just doesn’t happen to hit at the exact right time, it’s a blip. And then you’re just expected to do the next thing immediately.

There’s no like satisfactory moment of, I guess performing live is the only really opportunity you have to kind of unpack the work and share it with people in an authentic way. I’ve been so surprised, like just with the response Blippo, which to me seems like the most anyone has ever paid attention to, like anything, not necess necessarily say that it’s like the most popular thing I’ve ever made, but it’s the, the thing that people are reading the most closely just like lurking the discord and watching how people are like parsing. I’m sure you have this experience like parsing every single frame and trying to understand what the intent was It’s like really keeps you honest. there’s a lot of things where I, I’ve seen theories and been like, damn, I could have that, should have been that. I should have done that. That would’ve been great!

Sam Barlow: Well, sometimes they fix it for you, right? Sometimes you sit back and go, yes, that was what I intended, definitely that clever deep reading. I’ve not paid too much attention 'cause it terrifies me that I screwed up. But someone allegedly said there’s some reference to Princess Diana’s death in Her Story.

And someone was like, “oh no, that’s wrong. 'cause it it, the dates are wrong.” Or there’s some error. And then someone else jumps in and goes, “ah, no, but that’s deliberate 'cause it’s showing that this person is lying and, and, and making stuff up. This is obviously intended by the writer.” Yeah, a hundred percent.

A hundred percent. That is deliberate.

Claire L. Evans: All the mistakes I made were on purpose, a hundred percent. Just for the record.

Sam Barlow: Yeah. I sometimes, occasionally there’s stuff that people aren’t picking up and, and you kind of wanna just prod them from the sidelines, but I’ve always avoided it.

Claire L. Evans: It’s so surprising what people get, and what they don’t. I always think certain things are obvious and then they’re totally not, like especially references. There’s a lot of references in Blippo to like just the history of video art and tv. And some of them seem really on the nose to me, but people are like, what does this mean? And other things that mean nothing they have assigned canonical value to. So it’s really just, I dunno if it’s a generational thing. I think it might be. And I think actually also it’s been interesting to watch how people are responding to the, like non-interactivity or non-demand-ness of it. Some people get it 'cause they grew up with that kind of tv. But other people who are younger have never had that experience of having to wait for something to be on. And so they’re sort of like excitedly explaining it to each other like, “this is what things used to be like!” And that to me is really-- makes me feel a thousand years old.

But it’s also really fun to kind of kind of like reintroduce a generation to what things were like. I think that’s a really important thing. I grew up watching like Nick at Nite on Nickelodeon, which was like, you know, all of these old shows from the fifties. And I feel like every generation kind of needs that sort of like “here’s everything you missed from the generation before yours.”

So you can understand your parents better and you can understand the world that you came from. I don’t know that we really have that anymore unless you’re like explicitly going out and looking for like cool vintage stuff and trying to make sense of it. But I think it’s really important to have that context and so it’s fun to kind of force it onto a generation that never really knew what it was like to channel flip.

Sam Barlow: There’s definitely some very bad like fake nostalgia and things and, trying to Do this properly is cool. One of the games we’re making is set in 1983, and a lot of the team are younger than me and they keep suggesting things to do with phones. They’re like, oh, it’d be cool if you could do you could do like caller ID or you could call in to check your messages.

I’m like, that you couldn’t like these, these were mechanical devices at this point, and

Claire L. Evans: You could do like a human answering that existed in like the seventies.

Sam Barlow: yeah.

Claire L. Evans: Sorry, I’m giving you ideas.

Sam Barlow: yeah, we, we got a few bits and pieces, but like, one of the weirdest situations I had was I did this um, very short-lived interactive online tv, reboot of WarGames

so there’s this company in New York, I think they still exist.

They’re essentially now absorbed into Walmart called Eko. They were doing these sort of interactive TV things and they did this really cool one with the Daniels called Possibilia, which if you go back and watch now, you’re like, oh, this is them thinking about Everything Everywhere All At Once. Like, This was like a first draft for this.

And so I did this, WarGames reboot, which was originally, it was conceived of as being a pilot of many, many pilots. There were lots of different experimental pilots to sort of see the different ways you could make an interactive TV show. I was involved in this one. This was one of the few ones that actually got finished.

And then once it had been finished the less fun things was it was decided to break the pilot into lots of chunks to make it a season. So it kind of felt more of a thing, but it was conceived of as being a single pilot episode. Or so structurally that didn’t help, but it had a sort of loose amount of interactivity, not too dissimilar from something like Blippo and that the pitch was, we’re taking the 1980s hackers, but we’re updating. So we’re saying like, what do hacktivists look like now? And so it was a bunch of, hackers in like 2016 or something. And the interface was, you could see all of their webcam feeds. So it was as if you were all in a big chat room.

And sometimes there would be like at one point they’re hacking Fox News. So you’ll see the live broadcast of Fox News and then at some point they’re breaking into a military base. So there’s a guy who has like a Go Pro as he’s riding a bike through the desert and you saw all these feeds and what you could do as the player/viewer was click on a feed and that was your big in the same way that you might pin a particular camera in a, a kind of conference.

And based on what you are watching, it kind of paid attention to what you were watching. And then it did actually more than perhaps people realized, branch a lot. So if you were really focused on this character, Kelly, she would lead the scene. She would then get to kind of be the main star of the scene.

Whereas if you are watching this, it was, this little kid was like Steve Buscemi. He was the guy that always played Steve Buscemi as a kid in flashbacks.

Claire L. Evans: Amazing job

Sam Barlow: yeah, I dunno if that’s a good or a bad thing if you’re a young actor and it’s like you are the young Steve Buscemi. But he was like the kind of mischievous guy that was in it for the lulz.

And so, you know, if you focused on him, the scene might veer in that sort of direction. But at one point we did a focus test with the kind of target audience, which was kind of, early teens. I think my desperate plea to marketing, which was entirely unheeded, was this should be a Teen Vogue thing.

Like the audience that is reading all these great articles in Teen Vogue about politics and stuff, like this is for them, the characters are in that age range. This is who we’re making this for. In the same way that WarGames was for me when I was a kid. Like I was, oh, there’s this cool teenager who’s like hacking into the military.

This is cool. So we got all these kids in and they played it for like an hour and then they did all the usual focus testy stuff. But I remember there was this one kid who when asked to think about the experience, his big insight, he was like, "this was really cool. 'cause normally when I’m watching something, I’m not paying attention.

I’ll have my phone out, I’ll be reading, I’ll be watching, I’ll be chatting. The fact that this was interactive forced me to have to pay attention for an hour." And he said, “that was incredible. I’ve never paid attention to a story for this long. And it was incredibly rewarding to be paying that much attention.”

And I was like, well, I guess this is good. Like we, we’ve achieved this, but also terrifying,

Claire L. Evans: That is terrifying!

Sam Barlow: That, that he was having this revelation.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah, I’m sure whatever was going on then is, is magnified a thousand times now. I can’t even imagine. I

Sam Barlow: Yeah.

Claire L. Evans: wonder if a kid today would even have the attention span to do that for an hour maybe.

Sam Barlow: Just need to give them all Playdates and, and rewire their brains.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah I mean Maybe we underestimate, I know I you know, kids aren’t reading whole books anymore. I think attention has just become a very, it’s a very finite resource for all of us. I mean, kids and olds.

Sam Barlow: I feel like it’s pretty plastic. Like If I take my kid to a movie screening and we’re at a movie theater and they can’t look at their phone 'cause it’s a BAFTA screening, they’ll get told off. Like they can sit and watch the entirety of Tar and then be like, “what the hell did I just watch dad?”

And I’ll be like, "that was cool wasn’t it? Maybe a little morally complex for your generation, but "

Claire L. Evans: good

Sam Barlow: you know, what do you think? So, you know, I think you can, I think when you take everything away, I think it’s for the brain pretty quickly, sort of rewire itself. So.

Claire L. Evans: Hope so.

Christa Mrgan: And while we’re on the subject of attention and looking at your phone, I wondered whether there’s an overlap between FMVs based on these interrelated bite-sized video clips and things like TikTok videos and Instagram reels and the way that people are dueting or stitching other people’s videos and constantly referencing each other. And maybe there are people making FMVs using TikTok.

Claire L. Evans: I’m actually surprised

there hasn’t been an FMV–and maybe there has been and I’m just not paying attention because I’m not on TikTok.

Sam Barlow: They do exist. it was a big thing on YouTube was creating sort of, choose your own adventure video things within YouTube.

A lot of them don’t work anymore. 'cause a lot of them were based on a particular way you could create buttons or whatever within your YouTube.

But I remember like people like Markiplier did ones that had way more views than any of my games has ever, ever had sales. I was like, this is cool. But I remember-- talking about things that didn’t work, Quibi.

Claire L. Evans: The original Blippo, Quibi!

Christa Mrgan: Quibi was a mobile-first, short form video streaming platform launched by film producer and Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. It only lasted six months.

Sam Barlow: Yeah, I was in conversations, with Quibi and ignoring the name, the initial contact with me,

I got excited because they were like, Hey, it’s Katzenberg. He’s a genius. He’s raised more money than has ever been raised in Hollywood. He’s creating premium quality, short form, mobile first, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, well, that’s kind of what I was doing with Her Story was going, Hey, creating the sort of frequency of interaction, creating these little clips.

So you create the negative space so you create the gap for your imagination. Having those spark off each other, , like the phone version of Her Story was kind of integral. 'Cause I probably wouldn’t have embarked on any of that if phones hadn’t been blowing up. And I felt like there was a new audience for these things, so I was like, oh yeah, this Quibi thing sounds amazing.

And then I went and took meetings with them and I was like, ah, okay, maybe, maybe they’re not the people. Like all those awful stories of yeah, Katzenberg being like, I don’t really use my phone. And he’s the guy that’s like driving the vision for this thing. But like in theory there’s, certainly the sort of addictive loop

of a TikTok. I feel like there’s some of that in Her Story. It’s a slot machine with little nuggets of cool video story content. In fact on the new FMV game we are making, I tried to get back to that because I was like, oh, just the having things be that kind of bite-sized really sort of supercharges, that sort of compulsive loop and the kind of way it feels like you’re consuming stuff.

So I think, you know, you, it’s definitely there and obviously there’s the sort of basic motor functions of swiping and touching to get through these things. But yeah, the, the stuff you were talking about with the sort of self quoting and the sort of loops of people stitching on top of each other creates these very interesting kind of structures.

Claire L. Evans: And like the way we were talking earlier about just video-- the literacy that we have to kind of parse an image or parse a video, I think, everyone knows what it’s like to look at someone’s like Instagram stories or reels and try to figure out what’s like really going on there. You know, like what’s, what’s not being shown? And that’s very, that’s game-like in a way. 'cause you’re trying to sort of parse this material and make sense of it. And. I mean it’s something we all know how to do. And there’s also kind of a darkness to that though as well. Beyond the kind of privacy and surveillance components of it, it’s just there is this sense in which like the whole world is a story and everyone is like trying to spin it their way.

You know, there’s all these conspiracy theorists online who are trying to convince us that, you know, real life is some story with good guys and bad guys. And if we don’t believe exactly what they tell us, then, you know, we’re, we’re sheeple. So I think like there’s a darkness there too.

But it also, presents a lot of interesting new opportunities and, I think we can trust audiences to understand things on multiple levels and to look for for what’s missing as well as what’s on screen.

Christa Mrgan: And I think we naturally want to solve puzzles, right? We’re curious. We want to figure out what’s missing and fill in the gaps. And I figured that has to come up a lot for creators of non-linear stories. Like how do you write a story that works when viewed out of order? Like in Sam’s games, you have all of these little clips with parts of the story and clues and references.

And so what if players miss some crucial clips? And with Blippo+ yes, you’re channel flipping and taking the story in piecemeal from different angles. but there are still elements that unfold in a linear way. So what happens if someone misses a week of, say, the Playdate version of Blippo and they jump in at week three? what’s the approach for telling a story that way?

Claire L. Evans: Yeah, if you jump in at week three of Blippo, you’re kind of… there’s a wiki. There’s a wiki! The fans are picking up the slack. But I dunno, I think of it as like there’s basically two levels to the story. There’s like the overarching story. There’s the meta story that kind of plays out of the system level, and then there’s Rest of it. So like the, the meta story is kinda like a cruise ship. This is the metaphor I’ve been working with recently. It’s this big slow moving thing. It’s like going in a specific direction. It has a destination. But you know, what’s driving that cruise ship is all these little like rudders and propellers that are happening under the surface and no individual, one of those rudders or propellers is like responsible for the entire ship.

they’re just pushing it in one little direction and, you know, they don’t have to do everything. Some of them can just be world building. Some of them can be story, some of them can be red herrings with the format of Blippo being television the main thing was that each of them had to stand on their own and like be compelling and entertaining as television. Regardless of whether or not they’re like doing a job to tell the story they have to be like internally consistent and have a beginning, middle, and end. And that’s a really fun but challenging opportunity to do that in a minute or less. 'cause every single show on Blippo is so short. Once you’ve done the theme song on the titles, you only have 50 seconds to do a bit.

And that’s, a lot to you know, to have something that’s like in of itself. Like This is a great episode of a game show, but also it’s gonna move that cruise ship a little bit towards the destination. So I mean hopefully it’s like redundant enough that if you don’t watch everything, you’re still kind of get there in the end. But I think the thing about Blippo is that it’s, it’s really just depends on how much of a completist you are, like how much you will learn about the story.

Sam Barlow: you make a peace as well with things being incomplete, right? I mean, to use the TV thing, like you could tune in to the last 10 minutes of Terminator 2. And have a hell of a fun 10 minutes, right? And be like, whoa, there’s a cool, scary robot. And then be like, I’d love to actually go back to the start of the story and find out why this scary robot was chasing the lady.

and, and actually what you’re saying about the TV thing of each piece needing a beginning, middle, and end and needing to be complete. If you dig into all the sort of screenwriting guru stuff, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors around what is sort of basic math.

But then, you’ll see a Kubrick or a Lynch being like, this is my method. And the method is I have a bunch of things. Each of the things is cool and together they make something, but the sort of fallback is always, the individual bit is cool, right? I think Kubrick called them non-submersible units.

And you look at his movies, they tend to be like sequences or visuals or I’m gonna do this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing. And, and Lynch’s was, a producer had told him, " take out 40 cards, write a thing on each card. You have a movie." Right? But, the only screenwriting theory I kind of like is sequence theory.

And that isn’t even really a theory.

It’s based on the idea. In the olden days when things were reels of film. Creatively, they’d be focused on each reel being good and self-contained. And that was the sort of key structure. And essentially films were written by going each reel, we’ll ask a question, answer it.

And then that answer will give rise to a new question, which then gets you to the next rule. But, and, and so when I look at the kind of atomic pieces of all my games, it’s, the question is always, well, is this thing in and of itself fun? If I just threw this scene out, would you be like, this was enjoyable to me.

There was something to it. It did raise or answer some questions. And then the bit that is maybe a bit more sophisticated is we have these big spreadsheets, very big spreadsheets, and every scene has to tick off each column we have in these spreadsheets.

So it might be, in the case of Immortality, this was a project about filmmaking. So it was like, does this piece give some insight into the craft of filmmaking, right? It might be like, oh if they can’t get the slates in at the top of a shot, they have to do tail slates at the end and it’s upside down.

Or, oh, like just, or, or something goes wrong on set, or you see this is how they make people sweaty with these sprays. Or, you know, just smaller or big things. Just okay, is there something in this scene which is kind of exposing some interesting craft element of movie making? And then it would be is something meaningful happening in Marissa’s storyline?

So Marissa’s storyline would be broken down, so it’d be like the start of the first movie Ambrosio. The initial tension is can she impress this domineering director with her acting? She’s very young and untrained. And so all the scenes in that sequence should in some way, show and illustrate this question and the relationship between her and the director.

Any other character who exists will have their own stories and will also have to have a piece of their story answered. There are certain themes and images that get listed and those have to be addressed. And so we kind of go through and there’s all these different things that could be happening in one given clip so that when the player sees that clip, maybe I am really into the character of Detective Goodman or the actor playing him in the middle movie.

And so my takeaway from watching this scene is, oh, something weird is happening with this character. Why was he pissed off at the end of the scene? And now I’m looking for other scenes that when I plug them together will answer that or further ex explain that. Someone else might be following Marissa, Marcel across the years through multiple movies.

And it’s oh, where does this sit on the arc of her journey and what she’s doing? Someone else might be following some piece of imagery. And so I have no way of knowing what order people are gonna see things in, what particular strings they’re gonna thread together. But the goal is, you know, this is essentially a jigsaw piece that can be combined in multiple ways with many others.

And it is really fun as a writer in the way that, like writing Her Story made me aware of the words I’m using because that was the gameplay mechanic. So that the example I always use in Immortality was, we knew that because we were pretending that these were real movies.

We had to have some insert shots even though it was really hard to figure out how is an insert shot sort of telling the narrative. 'cause they tend to be quite straightforward. there was a scene in a diner where Detective Goodman is smoking, I think. And so we had an insert shot of him putting out the cigarette in an ashtray and sort of trying to figure out, we were like, well, okay, we do have this recurring visual motif of fire.

So we are kind of ticking that with the cigarette. And there is this interesting couple of points where we touch on the idea of cigarettes and fire and pleasure and humans. So that’s all good. What else can we capture here though? Like it’s just somebody stopping a cigarette out. So then we had the idea, well, okay, the film craft thing frequently when you shoot a closeup on hand, they’re not gonna have Brad Pitt sit around to shoot that.

So it’s usually not Brad Pitt’s hands. And it’s a thing that directors occasionally like to do to use their own hands. So like, if you watch Rian Johnson’s Star Wars film, whenever you see Luke Skywalker’s gloved hand, that’s actually him doing those bits. So we are like, oh, okay, let’s have it so that the director John Dur, is using his hand to do the closeup. And at this point in the story, there is a love triangle between John, Marissa and the actor playing the detective.

So we have Marissa off camera and we cheated a bit here 'cause they probably wouldn’t have been rolling sound. But have Marissa off camera be like, oh his hands are much more handsome than yours. So you can infer from the way she says this and the way he kind of reacts that this love triangle exists.

Like even if you had seen nothing else, you would get that there is some kind of thing going on. Someone like, oh, this is exciting now. 'cause now we have this shot that is hitting some thematic stuff. We got that craft layer in. Now we’re telling a bit of the story around where if you put that next to some other clips, you’re like, oh.

When the filming starts, it’s just Marissa and John sleeping together, and she has this idea she’s gonna seduce the, the kind of California actor. He comes in at some point, it is this menage a trois, and then at some point it goes horribly wrong, and then he ends up dead. So like suddenly now this insert shot has become a useful piece of that.

And essentially doing that process with every single piece in the game meant that I have some kind of confidence that you can make useful strings of content out of all these little bits and pieces.

but on some level, it’s like, that’s just good filmmaking, you know, even a linear piece, having that level of, of layering is always useful.

Claire L. Evans: what I was gonna say. That’s, that’s what the amazing thing about filmmaking is you you can be so efficient and economical about how you deploy a story through an image. It’s, it’s kind of infinite in a sense. Two things I wanted to say.

One is that my hand is in Blippo in a lot of places 'cause we had very few crew. And so anytime someone’s like handing someone a something from off screen, that’s usually my hand in like one arm of a lab coat or something. The other thing I was gonna say is. You’ll be horrified to hear that like almost no spreadsheets were harmed in the making of Blippo. Like I didn’t really even realize I should make a spreadsheet until we were almost done with production. 'cause we came up with a story as a group, like the, the overarching story and we had kind of a whiteboard with some index cards on it and we came up with a slate. And then the job of writing all the scripts I would carry that story fell to me. And because of our production schedule, like we only had three months in the studio that we were working in. The strike was on. It was like we had access to a lot of crew and to a lot of just like resources that we wouldn’t have otherwise had access to at that time. So it was like, we gotta just get this done right now.

And so I would just write a script for one of the shows. We would shoot it that week and then to write the script for the next show the next week. And then I’d have to look at what we already shot and figure out how to kind of like retcon in plot points and incorporate things and inside jokes and language and like lore from the first thing we’d shot into the second thing in order to make it consistent.

And then it just kept going. So by the time we got to the end, the final shows are the ones that are the densest because there’s just enough sediment beneath them. they had a strong foundation and then we had to kind of go back in post and do a lot of manipulation in order to make everything kind of even out, which is not the best way of doing it.

But it was also amazing 'cause it forced me to write really fast and to write like for exactly the actors that we had and exactly the resources that we had. So everything was like very efficient in that way. It was like, we have this person for three days, like we can build this set in this many days.

This is exactly what we’re gonna do. So it was really responsive to its environment, but totally bonkers. And by the end of it I was like, okay, I need, I do need a spreadsheet because at this point I can’t keep track of all in my head anymore. I could, it was all, it was all in my head until nearly the end.

And then I’m so glad I sat down and actually kind of charted out all the plot points because I think it would’ve lost my mind. And there’s still things where I realized that I made a mistake, you know, what week some, some piece of information is revealed. But I think it also kind of speaks to the fact that getting the story like kind of through osmosis anyway. Like There’s lots of things you’re missing as an Earth viewer because you don’t know what it’s like on Planet Blip and you don’t know where the rest of the discourse is. Like maybe Planet BLIP has radio, you know, or there’s other things going on on their planet where they’re getting information and yeah, it’s not just tv, although the TV is pretty all consuming.

Sam Barlow: I mean, that’s kind of how people would write stuff in the old days, right? Like network tv, that was especially soaps and things where you’re just kind of living by the seat of your pants and then you that rec conning. And people don’t always realize it. Like one point I was pitching, doing a game adaptation of a very successful comic book series and I’d never read the comic.

And I had like a week, I think before we met the creator of this comic. So I read like 400 issues of this comic in, in a week and went into that meeting. Being the person on the planet who knew most about how that whole story fit together because it was all still in my short term memory. And like after the meeting someone was like, oh my God, like Sam’s such a hardcore fan.

Like he had such a command of the material. And I was like, just don’t ask me next week. 'cause it will all have just, but reading that you’re like, oh this is so artfully constructed. A lot of the plotting was so clever and, and integrated. But you kind of realize, well 'cause there’s, there’s sort of that benefit of hindsight of just sort of month by month having a little bit of space to look back and plug in and then loop back around months later or realize what threads the audience were picking up.

'cause something like comics, it’s a little bit more strung out.

Claire L. Evans: Also, I mean at least with with Blippo’s production, it was fun 'cause we could just incorporate stuff that came up organically. You know, like there would be something where a performer just brought a really funny line reading or had a funny idea and then we would build that in and then that just became part of the lore.

And now something like a flexibility that we had because the scripts were so kind of, so, so fluid in the sense that we were able to just continually incorporate things. And I think like a solid 70% of the like language of the world, of Planet Blip is just inside jokes from us losing our minds, you know, like late nights production.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. I love these two very different approaches to creating narratives that are constructed out of bite-sized pieces. There’s Sam’s where absolutely everything is laid out in a spreadsheet from the very beginning, and the Blippo team’s approach of sort of making it up as you go along. And looking back and making new connections all the time with what you’ve already created and allowing that to inform the next week’s script.

Sam Barlow: It’s both, right? It’s like The process is iterating on the spreadsheet and, and I was like, I wanted to be a painter growing up. That didn’t work out. But for me, it’s closer to painting or sculpting where you kind of map things out and then you go in. get detailed here, but then you still have to stand back.

Then you go back in again and at some point you’re like, oh crap, I’m gonna redo this bit. But that, you know, for me, the, the requirement 'cause of the complexity of the games I’m making is that we have to keep iterating to the point where it works before we go and spend the money on the live action shoot.

But there is a lot of discovery.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah, 'cause once got it, you’re like locked in. You can’t back and change the live action performances

Sam Barlow: Yeah.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, I was so curious about this aspect, and wondered how play testing even works for a game like Her Story, Telling Lies, or Immortality. Like, are there table reads to make sure all of the different pieces work together and players have enough to complete the game?

Sam Barlow: It’s two things. One, it’s math. So, like Her Story, 'cause like I was making Her Story. anticipating a very small audience and, and sort of making it for myself. And I couldn’t afford to go to any shows or do anything with it, so I wasn’t really testing it. And I knew that I couldn’t do the sort of indie game 1 0 1 thing of like have a community that was seeing the game take shape.

'cause it was so narrative driven and because it was so relied on the video that there wasn’t gonna be anything to see, for people to get excited about. But my spreadsheets on Her Story would do math to see how connected things were based on the words being used. Call out words that were less or more densely connected call out particular scenes that were hard to find 'cause of the word choice.

And I would basically, it would give me like, these are the five worst offending scenes and five words most in need of attention. And I would go in and be like, oh yeah, I people can’t discover this particular clip ’ cause they, could search for the words that are in it, but a lot of them are being used up by other clips.

And so this is, this is like hard to find. And I’d look at it and be like, oh, that doesn’t make sense. She’s talking about her wedding day. Like, That feels so exciting and relevant that surely this is easy to find. I’d go and look and be like, oh no, but she said the word wedding too many times. So then I would pull up all the clips where she said wedding and get to be kind of, sort of a, again, sort of compositional about it and be like, well I really want this one.

This contrasts really nicely with her anticipation about the wedding, her regrets about the wedding that, oh, there’s this other one where she’s reading a fairytale about weddings. That’s interesting. And I would sort of pick which one’s got to use the word wedding and then I would go in and change, use marriage or delete the use of the word in the other ones. And so I would just kind of keep doing that again and again and again. or it would be like, Hey, you’ve got this word that’s being used four times. You could use it five times and create a little bit more kind of connectivity and, and just kept doing that again and again and again until the spreadsheet said there is a nice balance here.

There was like a curve of how hard it was to find clips that sort of went up a little bit steeply towards the end. So I kind of knew that there was a balance there and hoped that that, you know, the math would to some extent represent how people played the game.

Claire L. Evans: So not a lot of improv on set, I would imagine.

Sam Barlow: No, with Her Story and Telling Lies, it was like, you can do what the hell you want blocking wise.

But you have to say the words that are being used, and that was like, like Telling Lies was evil on my part. I think the worst take we had was a 17 minute long scene.

Claire L. Evans: Oh my gosh.

Sam Barlow: All one take, you know, one shot and with three different sets filming simultaneously. So if someone screwed up, we had to go again.

And

the, one that would really screw people up, I think it was the word baby, and curse words. So there was an, a intentional design to curse words where I was like, if players start searching for curse words, that should align with a specific character. So Kerry Biche was the mother. She got a lot of scatological words.

So she wasn’t allowed to say fuck. Which at one point she was like, I really cut, there’s this line where I have to say screw and I, I’m not feeling it. And I was like, I’m sorry, you have to, you’re an actor, make it work. But if the actor’s 12 minutes into a 15 minute take and they’re in the moment, and these were such weird sets because the way it was filmed, we would lock them in and it would be a 360 degree set and there wouldn’t be any crew visible.

So it was very like, immersive for them. If they’re getting angry and they’re in character, it was very easy for them to throw in a like shit or say something or there was like a whole thread around a literal baby that was very important. So we had to protect those words. And so often in sort of more sort of, friendly, intimate scenes, Logan would be like, Hey baby.

And he’d be like, oh. And like the script supervisor whose job is normally to worry about like continuity and things like that, our script, his job was just to be like. You know, we’d get to the end of a take and I’d be like, I really liked that one. Was that good? And they’d be like, I’m really sorry, Sam.

They said, “Detroit” and “fuck” and “baby.” It’s not gonna work. And because everyone was on camera, we couldn’t like to, you know, it was not ideal for us to actually kind of a DR and try and insert things. So we tried to get clean takes. The good thing was occasionally if I wanted to go again and do another take, and I didn’t wanna piss the actors off, I’d be like, sorry of the words got flagged by script, we’ll have to go again. use it as an excuse. As we spent more money on them and there were more people involved. We talked about like doing animatics and. Like is, is there a version of this you can actually put in front of people? We didn’t do it for Immortality 'cause it was too much work.

Telling Lies. There was a version where I did a read through with some actors that I knew here in New York. I played like four of the roles. I would put a different hat on. I was playing the mother-in-law, I’d put a little yellow scarf on. got my own 7-year-old to play the 7-year-old character. So we did like a really shitty table read of the game.

But because that was like the word search mechanic, we knew that it was like the minimum we could do to let people test the game. But we also knew that there was a whole lot of richness they wouldn’t be getting, so they wouldn’t be able to see locations and infer where someone was, they wouldn’t be able to look at costume and realize what was happening.

They would be able to see time of year by looking at the. You know, the, the set dressing and stuff. But the, the idea was, oh, we’ll go and test it and see what happens and if people enjoy it and if certain things are happening the way they should. And, and they did. And then we’re like, well that’s good.

'cause if they enjoyed themselves with this shit version, when we actually execute on it, it will kind of elevate everything. So that was one to test it with. We are doing more with the current game we are making, which is even more complicated. We wrote a simulator so the computer plays the game 10,000 times as a way… I think all the other games I was very insistent were not systemic in that there was no meaningful progression.

So, you know, all of the progress is usually in the player’s head in Her Story or Telling Lies or Immortality. there is some criteria that says you’re ready to see the credits, but that’s about it. But this other, this game we’re making now, there is a little bit more meaningful stuff. So it required us to actually create something that would play it

and then we can have it do that 10,000 times and be like, "oh, for some reason we’re hardly ever seeing this particular piece of content. For some reason, half the play through is erring towards this kind of part of the story. We need to go in and tweak it. 'Cause I’m generally, when I’m writing them and I’m putting numbers in things or the, the sort of setup, I’m not thinking of the beautiful train trip.

I’m not, I don’t have an elegant version of it in my head. I’m just like, this is a cool scene and write it, it’s very organic.

Claire L. Evans: Have you ever wanna do the Hitchcock thing where you hide yourself somewhere in the movie-- or, in the game?

Sam Barlow: No, because I, I hate that shit. I don’t know. I,

I,

Claire L. Evans: Hey, you were talking about reading all the parts!

Sam Barlow: I find it so distracting, The crew always like, “you should do your cameo, Sam!” like, I Don’t want to. I mean, a, I’m a really bad actor,

Claire L. Evans: You could be the guy behind the scenes, and the guy in the background and Eyes Wide Shut folding the cape. That could be you.

Sam Barlow: I would just, I would do a bad job of it and I’d hate myself forever. 'cause I’d be like, "dude, the way I folded that cape was so lame. "

Claire L. Evans: I was an extra in a movie once,

Sam Barlow: Yeah.

Claire L. Evans: just being in this party scene and all the extras you could tell were like out of work LA actors who just were like, “this is it. This is my moment. If I’m just animated enough in the background, I’m gonna be discovered.” And I, once I saw that you know, from a first person perspective, I can’t unsee it in movies. Anytime I watch any movie, I’m always watching the extras and they’re always doing too much, actually. Like It’s actually quite exaggerated in most mainstream films, but we’re just not key to be paying attention to them.

But they’re, they’re all there and they’re, they’re being extra, literally.

Sam Barlow: 99% of my direction. Whenever there’s a number of extras in a scene, it’s like, “Hey, could you go ask that person to tone it down? Could you, you know, tell him to chill it.” And it’s really hard ’ the union rule is the director can never direct an extra.

Claire L. Evans: “Oh, really?”

Sam Barlow: If I direct an extra, they get moved up a pay grade.

So I have to say to the AD, “oh, the one with the orange hat, could you ask them to stop doing whatever they’re doing.” But there’s also a game that the actors will play, you know, Fairly, where if they can get a speaking role or if they can sort of suggest that they speak, that does elevate them in how much they get paid.

So you will occasionally get people that are hired-- like I remember on War Games you had two FBI agents whose entire job was to walk alongside someone, step into an elevator, push the button, you know, do this like FBI agents. And this one guy kept trying to improv lines and he would just start being like, Hey, how’s, and start talking to the main actor and try to turn this into like a whole scene.

Claire L. Evans: That’s so funny.

And that was Timothee Chalamet.

[

Sam Barlow: I wanted to know was all this stuff on Blippo edible, all the goos and bloops and.

Claire L. Evans: We use the same like 99 cent store, like kids slime toy for five different things. It’s presented as food and also presented as an alien in the same week, I think. And then the cake. I made a cake out of plaster, so you couldn’t eat that. The drinks were all drinkable.

They might have been a bit gross, but all the drinks on the Werf’s Tavern show are drinkable ish. I don’t lot of stuff where like we would pull stuff off of craft service. Like I also ran craft services for Blippo. This is how small our team is. So I would like bake cookies in the morning But there’s some things where it’s like okay, well let’s just grab that from the the crafty table, and we’ll just put this on set.

I love props so much. We went to so many prop houses when we were making this like, and just like getting to see behind the veil of like where all the stuff comes from. We got, went to this medical prop house for one of the shows and it was the height of the strike and it was just completely empty and there was just thousands of hospital beds and microscopes and fake pills and it’s just a delight. But most of the props in Blippo are just like literally a salad bowl that I have that is funny to wear as a hat. You know, it’s like a lot of that level of what do we have that we can use for free? And yeah.

Sam Barlow: Did you know you were gonna do the color version?

Claire L. Evans: Ah, not initially, no, was initially designed as just a Playdate version and then we were kind of two thirds of the way through production.

Sam Barlow: Is the stuff you shot where you just were like, this will be fine ’ cause it’s gonna be black and white. No one’s gonna care or notice?

Claire L. Evans: Initially we thought like, “Oh yeah, this’ll be cheap to shoot. We’ll just make like cardboard sets that are black and white and we’ll just paint em You know like No one will have to know that there’s not a real desk there or whatever.” And then just the director that we’re working with, like she has this kind of full service little like analog production studio with a wood shop in the back, and it just kind of took on proportions.

Like Everybody got really excited and so we kind of overbuilt everything. And then it was like, “well, okay, well it’s already there so we might as well just pivot.”

Sam Barlow: Black and white thing’s crazy as well. We had, I think we just had the one, we had one scene in Immortality that was like a, a, an advert for soap that was supposed to be black and white, and the amount of effort you have to put in to make something read on screen in black and white where you think like, oh, they’re wearing these dramatically different colors, and then

Claire L. Evans: Yeah.

Sam Barlow: suddenly it looks like it’s all the same thing.

We having to fake certain colors to get them to pop in black and white. It’s crazy.

Claire L. Evans: old images of the Adams family set from the fifties? It’s all like the insane color. It’s like this crazy technicolor world but like really bizarre because that’s just what read on camera in black and white. I love that. And like the way that, you know, old Hollywood actors had like the most wacky makeup. we just never saw it.

like how ancient Greek and Roman statues were actually really gaudy, but we just, all the paint wore off, so we don’t know, and we think it’s really minimal and austere.

Sam Barlow: Well that really cool Jekyll and Hyde makeup was really neat ’ cause he, he had, was it, I dunno, like lots of red makeup to make him look monstrous, but then they put a red gel over the camera. So, although it couldn’t. Pick up on the color that meant that it was obscuring all of the red makeup, and then they slid that away and it was as if his face morphed

on camera.

Now, if you’ve never seen that, yeah, Google,

that

I think it’s, I think it’s Jekyll Hyde, right? Jekyll Hyde Makeup Effect.

Claire L. Evans: Movie magic! I just can’t get enough of it. It’s best.

Christa Mrgan: Agreed! And while FMVs never really became mainstream, games like Blippo+, Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality manage a sort of alchemy that combines movie magic with the magic of video games.

Claire L. Evans: Well this was great. Thank you so much for talking to me, Sam. I’m such a big fan, so this is really awesome.

Sam Barlow: This was, this was a great time. I’m loving Blippo.

Claire L. Evans: Yay!

Sam Barlow: I’m excited to see where it takes me.

Claire L. Evans: I’m so excited that you like it. It’s it’s really validating. Thank you.

Sam Barlow: I genuinely, I said to someone, it felt like the Playdate was invented purely to get this to this place where you could create this recreation of that specific moment in time of like TV technology. I’m sure. I’m sure there were a few accidents along the way that that wasn’t the intention.

But that’s what I’d like to imagine.

Claire L. Evans: I mean, shout out to the Panic team for building like a device that can, like essentially making streaming possible for the Playdate. Like that. That was huge lift as well on the other side.

Christa: Yeah, Panic engineer Dave Hayden basically designed and implemented streaming on Playdate just for Blippo+.

Claire L. Evans: Yeah! Let art drive technology. That’s the way it should be.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Yeah, it should. And I’m so grateful to both Claire and Sam for taking the time to talk with me and to ask each other great questions about the art and technology of their FMV games… or their interactive movies?

This conversation actually happened last fall, and then, as so often happens, I got pulled away from podcast Land to work on a bunch of different video projects, all of which were of course super fun, but I’m really glad I got to come back to this eventually. So thanks so much for listening! Down in the show notes, you can find links to both Claire’s and Sam’s work, as well as to all kinds of other stuff we mentioned in this episode. I hope you find some fun rabbit holes. Thanks again, and bye for now!

Sam Barlow: Bye!

Claire L. Evans: Goodbye!

Christa Mrgan: The Panic Podcast is written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan. Our amazing theme music was of course, composed by Cabel Sasser. Additional music was composed by Rob Kieswetter and Jona Bechtel, and comes from Blippo+. Neven Mrgan designed the podcast page and artwork. Tim Coulter built the website and wrangles the podcast feed. And Kaleigh Stegman handles social media. Michael Buckley made the super cool Audion web player on the website, featuring tons of faces he revived from the Audion archive. And thanks, of course, to everyone at Panic.

Sam Barlow: I don’t think in 2025 I need to listen to anything called the Panic Podcast.