On this episode of I Know This Guy we have the Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing for Skydance Media – Guy Costantini. Guy’s latest contribution to the VR world is the recently released and critically acclaimed “The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners”. We dig into how he worked his way from a small town in Italy to being on the forefront of gaming technology today.
Date: November 26, 2020
Episode: 31
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Guy Constantini, Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing for Skydance Media.
Subtitle: The Best Revenge is Massive Success
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-31-the-vanguard-of-virtual-reality-w-guy-costantini/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Nate Eckman, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Ultimate Media Ventures, which creates eSports content, experiences and products.
Guy also serves in advisory capacity to a select number of companies, out to change the games space for the better. Guy shared how he worked from wearing suits to doing something he love – games.
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Guy 0:00
Until you feel sort of like the resistance of the skull, you’re trying to stab a walker in its head and then the knife gets stuck and you got to kind of pull the head down and pull it out. Like that’s the easiest way to describe sort of how we brought this kind of tactile melee combat to the next level.
Norman 0:25
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy. The podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 0:53
Alright, so Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast?
Norman 0:56
Okay. You remember Nate Eckman?
Hayden 0:58
Yeah.
Norman 0:59
Absolutely cool Guy, right?
Hayden 1:01
Yeah.
Norman 1:02
Well, he recommended Guy Constantini. He’s in the VR world, which I’m not that familiar with. But just reading a couple of notes and seeing what he’s going to be talking about, it’s going to be really cool.
Hayden 1:20
Yeah, just with everything sent over. It looks like he’s been involved with major releases. So I can’t wait to find out more.
Norman 1:27
Yeah, like some of the biggest releases and one major release is going on right now. So it’s gonna be a really interesting conversation.
Hayden 1:35
Alright, let’s dive in.
Norman 1:39
Alright, so welcome to the podcast, Guy.
Guy 1:42
Thank you for having me.
Norman 1:45
Hey, it’s our pleasure. We were talking to Nate Eckman, he was on our last podcast and he couldn’t say enough good things about you. So all good.
Guy 1:54
He set me up for failure.
Norman 1:58
But no, he was a really incredible guest. I love talking to him. He’s got so much energy, and he has just so much going on.
Guy 2:07
So now he’s great at powerhouse.
Norman 2:11
He is. Just having that interview, he was referred, was it Bob Heere?
Hayden 2:18
Oh no. It was John Davidson.
Norman 2:20
John Davidson. Yeah and I mean, between John, another Guy named Bob Heere involved. All of these Guys, I mean, you Guys know a ton of really interesting people and that’s what the show is all about. So anyways, we’ll just get into it and Guy, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about your backstory . Like, if we can go down some rabbit holes, that would be great. But I really want to know, what makes Guy, Guy?
Guy 2:51
All right. Well, it all started many moons ago. So basically, I grew up in Italy, and my mom’s American, my dad’s Italian, they have the opposite story of everyone from New Jersey, because she’s from New Jersey and usually the story is, the Italian immigrant moves to New Jersey and meets an American Irish girl and then that results in romance, but we had the opposite story, which is my mom was an American Irish girl that wanted to get out of Jersey and so she went to Italy and she met my dad there and my dad was in advertising and so one very important day in my life that I never knew of, until like a few years ago, there’s this truck that pulls up to where my dad’s having like a convention, and it’s a truck full of Atari 2600s and apparently Atari decided they were going to give to AD execs a bunch of these consoles just to popularize the concept of video games and so lo and behold, my dad brings home this console and I’m a kid, I think I’m like 5 at the time I forget exactly the date myself. But the idea is, he just showed you this console and at the time, in the US, you had a lot of color TVs and we’re starting to get color TVs in Italy, but we still have a black and white one. Because we were like, not exactly the richest people and so I’m plugging in the Atari 2600 into a black and white CRT and that was my first experience of video games of Space Invaders and I had a great time playing with my dad and then sort of continued to play by myself and and it was sort of, I think, a crucial moment that I later realized was the beginning of my journey into games and ever since then, I’ve been sort of addicted to the making and playing video games and the story there is that I slowly started getting going from console to computers. So you have the 46th generation Mega and all those early sort of video gaming and computer systems and they didn’t work that great, right like to get to a game wasn’t just, you turn it on and you play. In a way I had to figure out a lot of ways to get the stuff to run the games that I wanted to run. In Italy at the time, things would come sometimes months later. We’d read magazines and try to find out what were the best games and sort of trusting journalists from God knows where to do the right amount of research for it and then you end up going and finding enough money to either buy a disc from some store that looked reputable, that was probably 50-50 shady and they had like Brick and Mortar storefronts, but like, there was no DMCA legislation. So they just like sell, they have like the box of the American game, that would be like $40 and then next to it would be like, the floppy disk that’s like $5 and as a kid, you’re like, Well, I mean, the box is great. But like, I only have $5. So I think it’s, I think a lot of people in Europe back in that day had that experience. So that was how we played games and you wait so long for a new game to come out. Because it was not something where there’s like 10 AAA releases every quarter, right? So that was sort of like my upbringing with technology and then separately, I was doing stuff like Boy Scouts, and Italy is a very cool place, and that it’s very compressed. So you could do a lot of activities, with very short commute times actually have some parallels to California, because you can go take a two hour trip and go up to the Alps and ski. You can take a two hour trip and go to the ocean, the beach. So it’s pretty active. But games are always sort of like this core part of who I was, to the point where like the first time and this is dating my myself, the first time they brought a computer into our classroom and this is a big deal because Italian school is I joke with my wife that American School feels like way too happy go lucky. Like Italian school was very institutional and depressing, effective, but very institutional, and terrific and so when we got a computer, I was overjoyed and then the math teacher was going to use it to teach us mathematics and I was going to partition it so I could play video games every time the math teacher was it, showing us knock on it. So that worked out. So I had some that was basically sort of the video game slinger of my local high school, which I guess is my first experience in my current career, that’s one of the rabbit holes that we could go down if you want.
Norman 7:27
So your first entrepreneurial experience was slinging video games?
Guy 7:33
It wasn’t very entrepreneurial, because there was no I guess I was trading in reputation, rather than any sort of capital. But it was more about sharing the experience that I thought was so amazing and that I felt so many kids just had no idea existed, I think there was starting to be turned into Nintendo consoles, and some of the games that were kind of very accessible. But computer games were still very early and they were very much a niche that only a few people knew about, especially my age at the time, like 12,15,14 and so it was kind of a thing that I wanted to share with the world and I joked that a lot of things that I was into that people thought it was weird for being into have gone mainstream, and I’ve always been happy about that, to think that I have, I am also very interested in sort of obscure urban dancing, and in electronic music and so that also happened to become mainstream. But at the same time, whenever you have a niche that becomes mainstream, you have certain members of that niche that lament the time when there were sort of few people enjoying it in dark rooms, so to speak and I’m actually on the opposite spectrum, and like I welcome it going mainstream. You lose a little bit of the magic, but go with remember the magic, and more people get to enjoy this thing that you thought was great. Why wouldn’t you want to share something that you really passionate about? So that’s my perspective on it.
Norman 9:00
I’m an old guy, so I think way back, and Pong and sitting around Pong and I looking at Pong right now and I mean, I spent hours and hours and hours. I mean, Hayden, if you sat in front of Pong right now, would that hold your intention very long?
Hayden 9:26
Depends on my state of mind. Maybe. So it depends on many drinks.
Norman 9:32
Yeah, I mean, it would be Pong parties. It was a huge thing. You just sit around and play this game and then the other thing was all the handheld games that started coming out with they just had I remember, there was a little football game.
Guy 9:47
I love those.
Norman 9:48
I would spend hours doing that.
Guy 9:51
They weren’t even like the game. There was an overlay right? So it was like the screen had like a plastic screen and there was stuff drawn on the plastic screen and then then there would be like pixels behind it that would change color and it was sort of fun. Yeah, I had a bunch of them. There was like, I think they have videos now. Yeah, videos of showing those to kids. Like they have like, kids say the darndest things or whatever. But they’ll put them in front of an old computer and they try to turn it on. They can’t, because this is the monitor button and why do you have a monitor button?
Norman 10:28
Do you remember Dragon’s Lair?
Guy 10:31
Oh yeah.
Norman 10:32
That was actually a Guy out of Toronto, I believe that started that and I remember going to the arcades, and that was the one that blew everybody away when that I’m not sure what the terminology is. But it was a smooth, seamless sequence and it looked like a real cartoon. It wasn’t so pixelated like a lot of these others. Yeah, that was one that really turned the corner for me. Where’s this whole gaming industry going when you can get something that real or that cool?
Guy 11:03
Yeah, I mean, the visual leaps are there’s definitely sort of mental milestones I have when things really turned a corner visually, or your stripes when you finally have these, like sort of 2d images that were given the illusion of 3d and then finally, you have when 3d happened and then you have when we started filtering textures and then started getting rid of the screen door effects, and started having video cards that would allow you to sort of not tax the processor, but have a chip specifically designed to make your visuals better and I think that when you go back, you see some of the magic of the game design from way back when still is still present. Right and if you look at even further back, like German board games, or where it all comes from, right? Germany has been playing board games for hundreds of years, right? Big family tradition and that’s where a lot of game designers that sort of go the traditional are trying to learn everything about game design, that they’ll start with German board games, and card games, because the mechanics and the math behind it and the way that you engineer fun and attention, and you grab attention, and you design progression, all come from there and they’ve been brought into the digital space, obviously, and there’s been more innovation. But, there’s kind of a history to how games have evolved and now you’re starting not just with retro gaming, meaning playing games that are old, but you’re starting to see games that even the finally arrived to the point where brand new games are being built on purpose around design and are being insanely popular. So one thing that is very surprising to me, but if you think about it a little bit of always be the case, right? It costs hundreds of millions or 10s, or hundreds of millions to make a triple A game, right and so it’s natural that that is the realm of the few, the very capitalised few, but you still have a group of three kids or three young folks getting together and creating something like Among Us, right? Among Us is an amazing game, like one of the most streamed games on Twitch in the past month and that was designed by a group of three, Mojang right? That was designed by a very small group Minecraft, right? So I think that you sort of have these smash hit games, and a lot of the Smash games from the past 10 years have not been games that are playing in a model that is predictable and there’s a massive, massive market for games that are a little more predictable, still very innovative, visually stunning. They’re more akin to a movie production, right? I think that goes to Tsushima or Red Dead Redemption, right? Then you also have a lot of space where people are just looking to play with their friends, they’re looking for an entertaining gameplay loop and that doesn’t require, a massive investment in visual fidelity or hours of like, hand authored content by teams of 10s and hundreds of people and so that’s one of the things that to me is very fascinating about the games world and I suppose it’s true about other parts of entertainment as well. But the amount of success you can have in games in the Indie space, and the ways in which you can build a game studio are just so varied. That it’s an industry that I’m truly, like, passionately in love with and I’ve been in love with my whole life and so from a very young age, I wasn’t just interested in playing the games, but I was interested in who was making them and how they made them and the stories behind them. Like the story of the Guys from Crytek like going with their Far Cry demo to like and like nobody would give him the time of day and like they finally get somebody to look at it and it’s incredible, right? This was like, right before Half Life 2 came out and everybody in the world was waiting for Half Life 2 because that we knew Valve was going to make an amazing game and this is like their second game from the awesome and like, a couple of months before that Crytek just drops like Far Cry and it’s like halfway to drop Far Cry, right? Far Cry was technically insane, right? Like the way they did it, they created their own engine and they went to like assembly to be able to be more efficient. So when you saw the game, or like how nobody had seen anything that was that good looking at the time running on the machines that we had, and it came and obviously, like, it didn’t undo the success of Half Life 2, right? Because the Valve guys know what they’re doing. But it was sort of this surprising moment where that continues to happen in games, or, you think something is there’s only certain things that are possible, and then someone really surprises you. I can talk about all kinds of those experiences just ad nauseum, like I could hear, for our podcasts talking about games, like every day. But I think my wife would leave me so I don’t think I want to do that.
Hayden 16:03
I have a question.
Norman 16:04
Yeah, go ahead Hayden.
Hayden 16:05
I haven’t really thought about this before. But what’s the competition like in the game industry? Like, I know, you have the big players in the indie industry. Are the people vying for different technology and is that like heated? Or is it more of an open space where everyone’s contributing and kind of building off of each other’s platforms?
Guy 16:21
It’s sort of both. So I think that anywhere where there’s a ton of money to be made, there’s going to be a ton of competition. But this is sort of a Venn Diagram of an industry that is very passion driven, and can be very lucrative and so you tend to have sort of the best and both and worse of those scenarios, right? So there’s a ton of competition for both employment and funding, there’s sort of established players that have trust and established teams that have been put together, once you sort of have one smash hit, it becomes a lot easier to get funding, it becomes easier, and you sort of to be the belle of the ball, right? It’s a lot harder when you’re in the Indie space. But it’s really about what you try to do, right? There’s a lot of programs for Indies to get funded. There’s a lot of ways to get funded, if you are able to think of games in a creative way, right? Like, if you want to go out and make the last of us three, or something akin to the last of the three, that is the realm of you’re going to spend over 100 million dollars or like just shy of 100 million dollars, you’re going to have to have a game team that has proven itself with people that have worked together, not just somebody that has worked at Rockstar and left Rockstar, right? But somebody that has worked at Rockstar, maybe left Rockstar brought with them their core team, and everybody on their core team has already shifted a very successful game together and this is their plan for the next game and then they’ll get funded, right? Because those big bets will get made on a new studio, unless the people that are putting it together are the people that can inspire that level of confidence, right and sometimes it’s just the leader. But there are few people in the industry that can command that. But at the same time, once you have that team, it’s a lot easier. But simultaneously, if you aren’t trying to go and make a 100 million dollar game, you can make a game for like $50,000. You can make a game for that. You go Roblox and make a game for free. Right like and prove yourself there. Or you can go to a lot of very successful game makers, started off making mods of existing games, right? So the Guys at Turtle Rock, right, like the Left for Dead was built on Source engine. Right? Now they’ve made like a massive amount of grip games. The Guy that ended up making PUBG, right, first was working with Daybreak doing each one, right and you can see sort of people that are really passionate about making games, starting to make games in whatever way is possible for them. Right? Like if you are passionate, like a person that hasn’t made games, but you want to make games right now is possibly the best time because the toolkits available to you are infinite and all it takes is time and dedication. So you can start as a hobbyist, and if you’re into it, like game making is not for the faint of heart. I give the same advice that I give to people that are like, Oh my kid wants to be a famous YouTuber. I’m like, great. Are they making YouTube videos on their own already and have they continued to do so and focused on it for the past six years? If true, then go nuts and do it but there’s still a high likelihood of failure. Right and I’m sure you guys know, it’s a passion driven craft that you should only ever do if you are okay, just pouring a ton of your time and doing it and getting whatever, right. That is my advice for anyone that wants to get into games. But if that is true, those two things are true. Then there can be amazing rewards there. There could be a very welcoming industry, where makers are very supportive of one another. There are aspects like in every industry that we need to make better and like with all companies, small versus large, there’s all kinds of different companies making games, right? There’re companies in Scandinavia that have amazing funding programs from their governments, they can take really bold risks, design wise, there’s companies that are large, and they rely on you who already haven’t had experience somewhere. But once you’re in there, it’s a much more predictable day to day. If you are trying to be employed at the same place for a very long period of time, that’s sort of rare in the games industry, but they’re places like that and if you want to kind of be master of your own thing, you can get together and do a remote team, like the No Man’s Sky folks, they were all like from different parts of the world and so there’s just infinite business models really to make games happen and I think the past year has actually taught us how resilient our industry is to things like COVID. It was obviously a challenge, right? But from the game making part of our business was able to quickly adapt to working from home. I would say we’re in the middle ground of like, like we’re pretty well funded. But we’re still, I would say we’re still sort of in debt in the space of a well funded India, the way I would consider our studio side.
Guy 21:23
I think that the Indie space already knew you could make games at a much lower cost, if you are a smaller team, like the more the larger your team, obviously, the larger the cost. But the larger the cost, not just because of obvious reasons, right? It’s not just the cost per person. It’s also the cost of working with a larger organization and synchronizing if you have a team of three highly skilled people that really trust each other, and that can both learn are kind of hats, you can make amazing stuff happen and so the thing that I find, as a marketer in the midst of the game makers, is that a lot of times, just because you want to make something cool doesn’t mean the world wants it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. But normally having a marketer at the table when you’re deciding what to make, will help you gain some insight into whether or not the thing that you want to make is actually going to be commercially viable and so every organization I work in, I try to make sure that there’s this like, really, I call it healthy tension and healthy communication between the game production side and the game publishing side. So we can inform each other of the stuff that we’re going to bring to market.
Norman 22:34
So I’m wondering about the opportunity for gamers in the Indie space. With COVID happening, are there opportunities for funding through the government?
Guy 22:45
Well, in Canada there’s a ton like the Canadian government has a bunch of programs, I don’t know off the top of my head. Canada is actually way more generous than the United States when it comes to video games funding. I think that there’s a program specific to the Montreal area, but also in Toronto, and Vancouver. There’s a ton of game development in all three of those cities, I would say the most is probably Vancouver. I actually don’t know if it’s the most in Vancouver or the most in Montreal, but they’re pretty big game industry hubs. The government has a lot of programs for both Indies and for just businesses. Like, I’ll give you an example. I don’t know the exact numbers, there’s a lot of tax subsidies in Canada, but in Finland, Finland is probably the most famous. I think they have like a 70%. Like you go in with 30% the government gives you 70% and it’s like a forgivable loan. So like, if you don’t make money, they’ll just forgive it since I may be oversimplifying, but it’s that crazy good and the reason they did it is because they tested it out and then like, Rovio or Supercell happened and they were like, Alright, well just pay for the next 50 years of this program. So let’s keep doing it right? In games, there’s always a conjunction of Oh, we did this thing that reveals itself to be smart. But if you peel the layers a little It was like, yeah, it was a smart thing to do that also benefited by good timing, and a little bit of luck and then when those three things happen, then you have a really smash hit and then we all delude ourselves that we’re geniuses, but usually, my experience has been that it’s always sort of a healthy mix of competence, timing and luck.
Norman 24:20
Yeah, that sounds like the case. Especially here, trying to get funding, people are laid off everywhere. But yeah, there are opportunities for eCom businesses, for the most part, I mean, the eCom industry, but yeah, it sounds um, it sounds like Canada does have these programs. I’m surprised that the US doesn’t have more funding available. I’m sure they will with all these layoffs going on right now. They’ve got to stimulate it somehow. But anyways, that’s for another podcast. I want to go back a bit. We got to the point where you’re in high school. What did you study in university?
Guy 25:00
So in university actually, I studied Management Science Information Systems, I guess it’s MIS. It’s called MIS now and the reason for that was because when I grew up in Italy, I had this idea in my head that I wanted to be an American businessman, which is like the simplest thing but hilarious. Tell my wife, she cracks up every time I tell her. Because I’m like, I say, you can imagine this all the time, I say, I want to be a businessman and like, literally, I became that. So, I guess that little kid was right, I got into college and directors and I was actually trying to go to the Coast Guard Academy, because I wanted to serve in a branch of the armed forces but they rejected my application. Because to Italy, the way that high school works is, you’re not really ever given like an A, like, they’ll give you a it’s on a scale of one to 10 and like, six is sort of like a passing grade and like most people get six and like, if you’re good, you get seven and if you’re amazing, you get eight. But like nine and 10 is like never really given unless you’re sort of exceptional and by exceptional I mean, like maybe one person in the class will get that and generally in things like Math, where it’s technically, you could say I got everything right, like, what else are you gonna do? But like in every other subject, you’ll usually have different grades and I’m not trying to make excuses. I don’t think I was at the top of my class or anything. I’m just saying that the translation of my transcripts did not impress the Coast Guard. So they were like, Nah, I don’t think so. But I think that with records, they interviewed me, and they spoke to me more, and they were like, I guess this guy’s Okay, so they let me in and so I decided, this is not, at the time, it’s way cheaper than what the kids have to deal with now, but I decided, you know what, I want to work for six months after high school to save some money. So you come to the US and like, I pay for my first semester, and then I guess I’ll find a job or something. So that was my plan, to go and be a businessman and so the long story behind this is I ended up working in a bunch of different jobs. I was helping a photographer, because I was trying to like getting some modeling money, not any sort of good looking model and just like catalog stuff and then I was also trying, I was working at a gym, I worked in a foundry and I had all these like odd jobs. I worked at McDonald’s for two weeks and I also worked at this computer store and the computer store, by far was the job that I got the most satisfaction out of typically, because it was just helping people with their computer bronze and it just, it’s this kind of, okay, I’ve helped someone today, sort of story that you’re able to tell yourself or still the other jobs, they just all felt like, I mean, the photography was cool. But all the other jobs, they just sort of felt like, this just feels like something that nobody really wants to do. They’re kind of doing it because it kind of works out and I didn’t want to do that. So I was like, Alright, whatever, I’m not going to do any of this, I’m going to try to figure out how to make some cash to work with computer store and also it was compensated pretty well, because at the time, I like to refer that to the time when you said, I know computers was like a resume line and and so like, when I came to the States, I immediately found work essentially being the go to DBA slash computer repair person for the school, and the school paid very little. So I immediately found a job off campus, working for some sales office, like giving them some VBA work, and computer support and that paid extraordinarily well for a college kid, like I think it was, like 25 an hour or something, which was like ludicrous and so that was a great way to like sustain myself while I was going to college and so that sort of drove me to think, I want to have a computer component to this business education I’m trying to get and I took a little bit of CompSci and CompSci at Rutgers is a highly theoretical, and I felt like I wasn’t really like it felt like I was just taking history of computers, instead of actually learning how to build things with computers and so I decided to do in my s, which coincidentally wasn’t teaching me that much more about computers. But there’s a bunch of business classes that I was really interested in and then I tried to teach myself programming languages and I realized very quickly, I didn’t want to program. I respect it, and I enjoyed the process. But I could see myself just like waking up and having spent the last 40 years programming and it’s just like I didn’t want to do that, I don’t want to be that single focus in my career and I think that over time, I learned that what I really like is to have a job that kind of pulls me in a lot of different areas and allows me to touch a lot of different parts of the business and so that’s why I ended up in marketing and publishing because that’s what you do. I like one day you’re working with sound designers and making like using some of the sounds for the game for a trailer. The next day, you’re designing an ad campaign. The next day, you’re figuring out which person on the design team is best to do an interview, and you’re flying around the world talking to people about games and so that is sort of what I do now, which I find really entertaining. Whereas the other side of the building side, you have to be able to sort of retain focus a lot more and be like, Alright, I’m going to do this thing for the next three months, which didn’t drive me.
Norman 30:25
So I’ve heard that you spent a lot of time wearing a suit and you decided that that wasn’t for you, either. You want to get into that a bit?
Guy 30:36
So if we connect to that, right, like, so I was at Rutgers and that was also when I got into the try music, I basically, I had, I was taking 21 credits of semi full time job, I was running my own promotion, like music promotion business on the side, on the weekends. So I was sleeping very little. But it was very fun. I promise you, I’ve had a good time. So I did that and so like, then I graduated Rutgers, and I realized, this is a great realization that is now teaching me a lot about like, sort of, I want to speak to my kids about education. I graduated, like very quickly. Oh, and when I graduated, I was like, wait, wait, it’s over. Like what? Like I was having a good time, it should be taken a little slower. This is not cool and so like, once I graduated, I sort of like use my resume career at the time to get a job that makes sense for the area and the area, it was very much about health care and so I ended up working for like Merck and Bristol Myers and some of the big pharma companies for a couple of years and it was just like, it felt very much. I don’t want to say Dunder Mifflin. But like, that’s what it felt like, right? Like, it’s just like, it was very much like, people didn’t feel like they were having a good time where they believed in what they were doing. They just felt like, like I assumed the scientists somewhere in the lab, were loving their job. But I was like tech support for executives. So like, and the executives seem like they were having a good time, like flying around the world and talking about drugs. But like, in our sort of bullpen, it felt like Alright, this seals like, not that cool and there’s this moment where I was like, I figured I was doing night shift because they really needed an executive that isn’t a support. I was doing a night shift and I was like one of two people and this is like 100% bullpen. I’m just like, this is very boring. So I’m going to figure out I’m going to get an adapter. So I can plug my PlayStation into the monitor. So you just play video games all night throughout and just get paid to play video games. So I was doing that for like a good three months and I played like, and I defend that GameFly, which is a game subscription service, that was just like subscribing. I’m just like churning through games, and three months and I’m like, if I keep doing this, I will again, I had that realization again, I’m like, I will wake up in 40 years, and I’ll still be here playing PlayStation 11 and like, I should probably stop feels like that, very self destructive rabbit hole. So I decided to look for something else and I found this kind of startup in New York City that was sort of revolutionising the way that clinical trials were run. The healthcare industry at the time was incredibly archaic to utilize. But what they used to do is just send a bunch of laptops out to doctors offices, and the doctors would have this like drawer full of laptops, because they were all proprietary and so they like type up their stuff, and then ship the laptops and then some other company would transcribe the notes into another database, it was just like, if you can think of like the most inefficient way possible of operating a business while being extraordinarily funded. That’s what they were doing. Not quite like insurance level of efficiency, but like close and so this one company, it was a bunch of guys that were trying to do clinical trials on their own and frustrated with the process, they created just a website, it’s like a single instance multi tenant, cloud based really input mechanism and so that was super revolutionary, and they had all the right connections. So you’re about to experience the business go from like, 20 people to like 1000 in like, five years and that was like extraordinary from a sort of business upbringing perspective, Let’s travel the world, start an office in Japan, start like offices in Eastern Europe, like and my focus was still sort of like Tech Support, and Client Services. But it was now like, I was understanding a lot more about the business and how it was set up and what was making a tick and at the end of sort of going public, like I’d learned a ton about growing business in a field that I like had zero interest in. So when we were talking about how to expand business, I was very interested and engaged and that was awesome. But as soon as the dust settled, and we’re like, Alright, well now we’ve grown we’re ready to continue to service our fine health care clientele, I went from 100% interest to 0% interest. Like you could not engage me on the topics though just like I just don’t care. Like, all I’m doing is reading about video games and playing video games, and trying to find out where the best game companies are. Spoiler alert, there’s not a lot of New Jersey and so I was like, Alright, I need to figure out a way to like, get out of here. Let me figure out how to make my way to California. I think that there’s a lot of stuff out there. But you know what, I’ll go work for a game company anywhere. I started this sort of mid career transition to try and figure out how to convince a game company to hire me, and not like start me from the ground up because I had a wife and a child and like that is a level of expenditure, right? Like, I can’t just start in QA and make like $12 an hour, $15 an hour. So I went ahead and like undertook what I thought was like a really, really challenging job hunt and surprisingly, I found a startup out of LA that was looking for people from outside of games, because they thought that people from the game space really didn’t understand what they were doing as much and they had a lot of people that were young and smart, but didn’t have a lot of people with a ton of leadership experience. So they needed somebody that had a mix of like of Client Services background, leadership experience, passion for games, and then and that startup was called Riot Games. So I moved over to LA Santa Monica to help Riot with League of Legends and that was sort of my entryway into the game space.
Norman 36:34
That’s nice. That’s a nice way to enter.
Guy 36:36
Yeah, and that’s where I met Nate actually. Because I entered in and like the game was doing, it was just starting to like really do gangbusters and so we were doing the all these programs to help our community really be more engaged with the game and be able to get their friends together to watch League of Legends, get people on campus to play League and to be rewarded for doing so and Nate was at an agency called SE Studios, which is I think owned by Mr. Cartoon or something, they have one of the coolest like agency locales in LA that I’ve ever been to. Because it looks like an old garage that got turned into an agency and they still have all the low writers just hanging out there. So very cool place and I remember one of the first times I met Nate, I walked by like this desk, and there’s just like a sword just sitting there and it was like, in a case, right as a Japanese or, and it looked very old and I’m just like, Nate, What is this thing? This looks very cool. Like, this is like a prop from some game that you do? He’s like, Oh, no, no, just some Yakuza Guy traded it in for a tattoo and I’m just like, you are a very cool person. I want to be friends with you. So that was kind of how we got started and designed a bunch of like clothing for people to wear on campus to kind of show off that they were part of the League of Legends world and that worked out really well.
Norman 38:05
Very cool. I didn’t hear. Yeah, you didn’t tell us anything about Yakuza and swords?
Guy 38:12
I don’t know, I know they’re an agency. So you can trust like 20% of what they say. So maybe that was just a flick line.
Norman 38:20
So you ended up being involved with the VR world and that’s your world right?
Guy 38:26
Yeah, I mean, right now, the focus of our studio is VR. We also obviously have guidance, we do TV movies, and we work on sort of bleeding edge technology entertainment. So what that means is, if you think of Gemini man, but the movie side, that was a movie that really pushed the envelope technology wise, right? If you think of what we did with Saints and Sinners, it’s a game that really uses VR to its fullest extent to deliver a game experience that you can’t have anywhere else and that’s sort of how we look at technology and entertainment. Our lofty vision is, it doesn’t matter where you consume your entertainment experience. We want to create things that are right for the medium and then we want to create worlds that can span multiple mediums and we want to be able to do so in a way that uses the latest technology available. So we’re feeling like we’re using it to the best possible way to tell them stories. So storytellers at heart, but really, there’s a large component of technologists among us and so that’s sort of like scannings a directive in this the work of Saints and Sinners has really, without hubris I think there is no other game where you can have maybe you can feel melee combat, the way you can feel it in our game in VR, and even outside VR like I love a lot of really top end incredible games on a 2d screen and I can, I give credit where credit is due but you just won’t have the same experience. Because until you feel sort of like the resistance of the skull, you’re trying to stab a walker in its head, and then the knife gets stuck and you got to kind of pull the head down and pull it out. Like that’s the easiest way to describe sort of how we brought this kind of tactile melee combat to the next level and of course, like, innovations like these are phenomenal and we were in love with them, because we did them. But they’re happening across the industry, right? So you have other people that are innovating, we’re constantly looking at them and say, What did they do that looks really phenomenal, or they pushed it farther than we ever could? Like, you look at some of the stuff that Valve did with Half Life Alyx, where the object and directivity and the physics and some of the stuff on the shelves is really top notch. There’s some of the stuff done by some of our other competitors really cool. So the VR space, I love for a couple of reasons. One, it’s you have to be very careful about how much money you spend and I’ve worked in a lot of companies where that wasn’t the case, because we already had a rocket ship that was a money printing machine and that’s exciting too. But you have different problems. Whereas like in VR, the market is a certain size and what you can do is a certain size, and you have to get really creative when you have those constraints and simultaneously on the game design side, it forces sort of the what I call the razor, which is Alright, what is the thing that we’re best at? Like if you look at something even like super hot, right, like you pick this one thing, and they’re really great at it. Another good example game for that is Super Hexagon. I don’t know if you’ve ever played it, it’s a game for your phone and all you’re trying to do is get a triangle out of a hexagon that’s closing in on you and it has a really cool electronic soundtrack behind it and it goes faster and faster. incredibly challenging game. Very simple. But a lot of times creating something simple and challenging and amazing, is way harder than creating something or neat and elaborate. It’s much harder to make something simple and great, and to make something good and big, right?
Hayden 42:06
Hey Guys and gals. That concludes part one of our interview with Guy Costantini. Make sure to tune in next time to hear the rest of the interview. As always make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share with your friends. Also, if you’re on social media, we’d love to hear from you. Send us a message or start a conversation on our Facebook page. We’d really love to hear your thoughts on each episode. That’s enough for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:01
Hey Guys and gals, welcome to part two of our interview with Guy Costantini. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back and listen to it and if you’re on social media, let us know. We’d love to hear your thoughts on each episode. That’s enough for me now for the rest of the interview.
Norman 0:19
So I started talking to you about Pong, and spending hours doing that. Now, your game, The Walking Dead, Saints and Sinners. So you mentioned that that’s your baby. Are you telling me that, again, I don’t have experience with this at all. But are you saying that you can actually feel the resistance if you’re pulling it out of one of the walkers heads?
Guy 0:43
Yeah, so let me let me explain to you a couple of the systems that we have in the game, because this will kind of illustrate. So there is vibration, and there is sort of haptic feedback in your controllers. But on top of that, we layered the system that we call visual haptics, which is the simulation of object weight, and the simulation, visual stimulus, that shows you something that makes your brain interpreted as weight. So for example, when you’re trying to pull up a heavy object, where your arm is in the virtual world versus where your arm is in the real world, is a little bit offset and what that does is it makes you feel the weight of the object and that’s just an example. Right? So when I stab a walker, I will feel a little resistance that I stabbed through and then after I’m done stabbing through, the walker will come with me if I pull in, it has weight, right, and it behaves through realistic physics. So that is part of the experience and how it’s a mix of actual tactile feeling that we can convey to you and usually what you see to trick you into augmenting the tactile feel, and so that’s part of the magic of it and then of course, you are in it, we have this thing that we internally called attention engine, which is we like to have you in a state where you are kind of close to being panicked, but not really, you’re kind of tense and then like eventually, you’ll run into a situation that will drive you to panic and that will pull you back a little and you get a little bit of a break, and then you’re back in the panic and so there’s and it’s programmatic. So there’s a lot of like, unpredictable situations that happen. They’re very surprising and satisfying. So like, you may think that killing a walker is easy, and you’ll get familiar with it and then you’ll see two or three and you’re like that’s not too bad, I can take them and then before you know it, there’s like five or six and you dropped your gun, and like your knife is about to break and now you’re in the ship and now like your body is panicking, you’re pushing them away. But now you’re tired, your stamina system essentially like emulates you getting tired from time to shake off all these walkers and so what the game does really effectively is drive you into situations that you thought you were prepared for and then show you that you’re not prepared for that and slowly you get better at this, right? So you will really understand whether or not you will survive a zombie apocalypse and also, you will really learn a lot about sort of the things that games do in 2d, that you assume are the truth, but really are designed for you to have fun, right? We’re also designing ourselves to have fun, like we didn’t go hyper realistic, because then most people would just never hit a target and it would just be super frustrating. So we were very careful about sort of driving a ton of realism, while also keeping the game super fun. So for example, having to reload a two handed weapon while there’s lockers on you, the first time you do it you’re like, Oh my God, why do I even have it to him with this is useless. I want to have a knife and a pistol and that is the most effective way to like, go around, right? There are situations where a two hander is a lot more effective, like you’re trying to sweep around the big quarter walkers, maybe you’re trying to one shot their head, maybe you’re trying to use a shotgun to go against humans. Because humans are smarter than walkers. They have helmets and they duck and so there’s sort of this really complex sandbox that you get to play in and a lot of it, a lot of the complexity is not just visual, actually visually, if you look at our game, we took a lot of care to make it look stylized. So we could push the envelope of the VR headsets. But if you go and play something on, I don’t know, next year’s console, it’ll look way better, like visual fidelity wise, but it doesn’t have all the other mechanics that we have, right like we’re running 90 frames per eye. We have physics going on in each one of the bodies that you’re interacting with. So there’s a lot of stuff under the hood that’s happening that to me like having a knowledge of part of having a domain is very impressive. So it’s something that I’m incredibly proud of the team for doing, because it makes my job easier, right? Like, it’s way easier when I’m trying to tell you, Hey, you can’t play this anywhere else, you have to get a headset, and sort of overcome that initial resistance to VR, and then jump in and then have the mind blown.
Norman 5:21
How many people were involved putting this thing together?
Guy 5:24
But in general, I think at its peak, it was probably around 80 people, I think the average is probably around like 50 to 60 throughout the length of the project and it was about a two and a half year development timeline.
Norman 5:46
Hayden? Is he sleeping? He doesn’t listen, when we’re talking, he goes, and he does something else.
Guy 5:53
I have failed. I thought I was so much more interesting.
Norman 5:59
I was gonna say, Hayden, to put that on my Christmas list. It’s so much more interesting than Pong.
Hayden 6:07
If you put it online, too.
Norman 6:09
All right. Okay. So no, that sounds incredibly cool. Like, with everything that you’re describing, what’s coming next?
Guy 6:20
Well, I think that, frankly, I think that VR is still very early. So when you think of VR as a technology, I would think that we are in that kind of early, I would say, like right before the Monster Cards dropped, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. But there was this video card called the Monster Card, and it came out and it changed everything. Because all of a sudden, like the texture of crisper. It was the first card that enabled you to have off processor processing, and anti aliasing and so everything just looked better and I think that it was either at that turning point with the Quest too or was like right before it when you had like sort of like the 486 dx. Because it is a massive leap. This year has been a tremendously impactful year for VR, in that we’ve had the Quest come out basically last year, and we had the index with Half Life: Alyx and then we had the Quest to just come out right now, right and those are sort of like milestones that have really driven the technology forward. I think the future of VR is all like inside out tracking. I think eventually, you will have the seamless ability to sort of make certain parts of your experience transparent, so you can see the outside world and the people around you. That’s already sort of the case. But I think in the next couple of months, you’re gonna see some stuff come out, that’ll allow you to do that. So you can have like sort of virtual office and still see the world around you. So I can wear my headset and still interact with you and I’ll feel I’m isolated and you do not feel like you can mess with me. That’s sort of where we are and you’re starting to see people use the technology beyond what the company intends it to be used for. So I’ll give you an example of that. So the Quest to end the Quest one have this where you have a link cable that allows you to use it as a rift. So you can use your powerful PC to play games that require more power, if you just have a USB cable to it. But people have been like, No, you know what, like, we have very strong Wi Fi networks, can we stream this over Wi Fi and you can. It turns out you can virtual machine into your desktop and have the best of both worlds, right? You have a while it’s currently not like plug and play, right? Like you have to go through a little bit of a hacky setup, use some third party software, but you can and this isn’t like a hacky setup as in, like you need to go into the firmware and change stuff. This is like tacky as in like, you need to look stuff up on Google and follow instructions, right and so the, you can easily have your wireless headset that has like really high resolution, and you can play it wherever you want and then when you want to use your PC, you can Wi Fi into your PC, and use all the library of content that has been built for PC VR and so with that, I think it’s sort of if you’re a gamer that really wants to experience amazing games, now is a phenomenal time to get into VR, right? It’s one of those moments where I mean, the new headset is the new announced $300 version, right? That’s, it’s insane. Like, they have to be subsidizing it just because it’s such an easy barrier to entry and yes, they’re competing with the new console generations and listen, I think the console generations are going to be great also but I think that the current console generation great, amazing games on PC and console that you can play right now. So I think that if you’re an enthusiast and you really love games, sort of now’s a great time to get into VR and I’m not just saying that because I want you to try our game, I’m saying because like, this is what I tell my friends, right? Like, it’s finally and I think Quest one was also sort of a good time to get into it. But now it’s sort of a no brainer like that if you’re someone who’s passionate about games, and sort of seeing what’s next, this is sort of what’s next, right? If you want to bring it ahead, like 5-10 years, it’s always very hard to make accurate predictions. But the easiest thing to think about for me is sort of a really small form factor, augmented and mixed reality setup, right? So you can think of something that either is running off your phone’s processing power, but wirelessly transmitting it to a set of glasses that are kind of covered. So you can still cover the eye completely. But it’s a really sort of like low latency and low weight device, something that you could wear as eyeglasses, then they turn into a screen that allows you to just have really quality of life AR and then I think just like I have my monitors at my desk, and my TV in my living room, we’re still going to have technology that you decide is the best way to experience something. Like, I was having this conversation with a bunch of my gaming friends and like, a lot of people made the mistake, and are still making the mistake to try and to say, Oh, we want to have this game, this PC game on a mobile device, because then we can tap into all those mobile players and it’s not completely inaccurate to say, if I can engage with my game on my mobile device, I will stay more engaged in my game in general. But the experience of what the times when you’re playing on your mobile device are different and you have different entertainment objectives than when you’re playing on your PC, then when you’re playing on your console and when you’re playing with your friends. In order to design an experience that is great on one of those devices, you’re going to have to take some trade offs, and there’s going to be cross platform, that’s the other future part that I think you’re gonna see a lot of cooperative cross platform, gaming is going to continue to happen, because that’s what we all want, right? Like we’re all like the majority of gamers are now in their 30s and 40s and they still want to play because that’s a great way to be entertained and connected with your friends. But now they want to play with their kids and they want to play with their friends and they want it to be seamless and they don’t want obstacles caused by you having an Xbox and me having a PC, or you have a PlayStation and me having a switch, like in the gaming industry is coming around to that. It’s obviously working against some of their interests, it’s taking a while. But in general, what the players want is a seamless gaming experience that they can share with their friends and there’s still room for single player experiences too, right? Like I want to be able to enjoy myself. Sometimes I just needed to be my thing, right? But that’s sort of like where I think the technology will push game experiences both from a technological innovation that we can touch like a headset is very much tacked on, right? You see it you’re like, Oh my God, this looks like the future, right or a future. But to me, sort of cross platform play across all games would be a much more disruptive innovation to the industry that it’s taken forever to do because the interests of the businesses aren’t aligned with the interests of the players.
Norman 13:30
Well, since this is such a new technology, are there any misconceptions that people have about VR gaming?
Guy 13:39
Yeah, so there’s a couple actually, that come from like the initial hype cycle. So a lot of VR games don’t make you sick. Some VR games do make you sick, the sort of feeling of sickness that you feel. One is something that you can habituate yourself out of. Two, you can take Dramamine or use the relief band and three, there’s game design elements that reduce nausea. So for example, if I don’t have you do a barrel roll, or if I don’t, like there’s things that I can do with your line of sight to sort of like focus your eyes on that and you see a lot of that done in our game. So we have things like snap turning. We have things like fovea rendering, we have things like reducing your line of sight when you’re moving faster. If you’re running, we sort of like close into your line of sight and what that does is it makes it just more comfortable on your body. So a lot of people that maybe tried VR 3 four years ago, and they tried a simulation where they put you in dislike a spaceship that was like navigating around the city, like that will make you very ill, especially if you’re prone to that or a certain percentage of population and so a lot of that we’ve gotten a lot better at I think that there’s still a lot of challenges in there like just, it can still be isolating, but there’s a lot of games that aren’t isolating, like they have multiplayer Beat Saber. You can play, seeing somebody else in VR and being able to talk to them is still like this kind of like a mind blowing moment. It’s like you almost have this weird feeling, as an adult and I’m like a pretty big extrovert. It’s still a weird feeling of like, hey, digital person whom I don’t know the identity of, but I’m seeing it represented in front of me. So I think that, there’s just to me, that could be a very positive surprise. But of course, it’s something that people should be aware of before getting into it and then I think that at the beginning, people said something like, kids under 13 shouldn’t use VR headsets, because it messes with their perception of reality. You always have this at the beginning of technology cycles, right? Like no people making big bold claims.
Norman 15:38
Rock rock, absolutely, like rock and roll. Right?
Guy 15:42
Exactly. Right. Like, it’s always gonna be the case. Right, but I think that over time, people just like, as humans, we do have a trait that is sort of self destructive, but also innovative, which is a lot of times you just don’t listen. Well, you tell me that’s a bad idea. But I want to see for myself and so the outcome of that is that we will find out the ones that are actually bad ideas, because people do dumb stuff. I would say these are pieces of equipment. So a lot of the VR headsets have chaperone systems now. You kind of draw your space, and then a grid comes up so you don’t break all your stuff and I recommend that somebody new definitely set that up and doesn’t skip that setup. That way, you don’t start hitting stuff around your house. Because I definitely saw our game is so intense that I was testing in my office and I totally skipped that because I work in VR, so I’m immune to these things, right and so I definitely, like just straight up punched my TV and like, it was just broken, and the IT department was not too happy and I was just like, just an idiot. Guy, you could just fall off the shower, and there’s a banana. So, it’s something that I find really exciting and I can’t recommend enough and I’m also very, I generally tend to be pretty, like, I’m not trying to push it on to people like try it out, like super like it. Some people are late adopters, right? Like some people are like, No, I want to see more people play it and say it’s great before I try it. That’s cool, too. Or like the way I look at games and it’s the same commentary I had, when I worked in mobile games for a while. It’s like, if you build great stuff, eventually massive amounts of players will come. So like just focus on building great stuff and don’t try to force it. Tell people it’s great, haven’t tried out and generally, if you’re building great things, you will have a great business over time and that’s sort of what I like to follow when I try to make business decisions and our side of the business. It’s like, should we make this like do? Does it make sense to make it? Like what are we trying to do here? Like if we’re just if we’re trying to do something that’s been done before, and it doesn’t really push an anvil? Like, what are we doing? Let’s do something else, let’s do something that really brings the medium forward that really kind of will stay with players and create really valuable memories.
Norman 17:58
When you decide to make a game like Saints and Sinners, so the Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, and you’re going after the Walking Dead fan, does that put a ton of pressure on you?
Guy 18:13
I’ve worked on a lot of large IP, I worked on Star Wars, I’ve worked on Marvel, Walking Dead is a really big IP as well. You have to have a part of your team be super fans of the franchise, because you want to be aware of how a superfan feels, and you want to create something that is authentic to what they want. Simultaneously, you can’t just do fanservice like creating a story and creating something special for a fan of a franchise means that you have to add something new and cool that they weren’t expecting. Because that’s what got them into the franchise to begin with. Right? I didn’t get to it because it was just something they expected. Right? So you have to, in my opinion, be cognizant of that. To me, it’s an opportunity, it’s always an opportunity to work in the franchise, like from a pure business perspective, you’re working with a very large audience that you know will at least read the first article that you put out there and they’ll be like, Alright, I’ll see what this is about. Whether they’re skeptical and optimistic or skeptical and pessimistic, you’ll get their initial click and then you need to make sure that what you have to tell them is something that they will appreciate, right? That is respectful of their family and so I think that that is the risk part that we work with really large IP, there’s a massive risk component, if you build something that isn’t up to their standards, or that isn’t provably something worth their time and obviously, like the scale of your endeavor matters also. Like if I’m just making your Baby Yoda keychain, I’m sure that if I make a crappy one, they just won’t buy it but like there will be less scrutiny that if I’m trying to make an MTV show based on Baby Yoda and so what I’m getting out with that is that the VR space allowed us to tell a brand new story to an audience that had expectations and we wanted them to understand that we got that they wanted to feel in that world, but they could go somewhere else to consume another like, Darrell Carroll, and Rick story. Like, there’s places you could do that. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to go and create something new. put people in that kind of survivor mindset. We said, if you’re not a fan of The Walking Dead, and you play our game, will you love it? That was like the prerequisite. Prerequisite is yes, you will love it and if you if that is true, then fans of The Walking Dead that come will love the fact that we created a great game in their universe and so that was sort of the mentality we went after to tackle this and it seems like players really respected that and in general, that would be my advice to anybody making and the larger the IP, the bigger the risk, but also the bigger the reward.
Norman 21:03
Yeah, it kind of brings up, I read an article that you were in from venturebeat.com and it mentioned that a large part of developing the game was the storytelling. So going to be going out and like you were just mentioning that you want to bring in people that may not be the fan of a Walking Dead. Also, make sure that the fan does love it and what kind of process do you go to build out that story?
Guy 21:32
Well, so Skybound are really good partners of ours, and they created the Walking Dead Universe. So we work really closely with their creative leads. They sit right in the room with our narrative writers and together we craft the stories and we come up with essentially like, what is this though this new store in The Walking Dead Universe, how does it fit? There’s a lot more to it that we may not expose, right? Like there may be factions that are that we created, that may be connected to factions from the world that we just haven’t talked about yet. You do a good world building exercise and a good story building exercise, and you do it with the people who have created the IP. That way you can be authentic to the creative process that is funded and then on top of it, you have something new that you feel is fresh, and that makes people fall in love once again, with the story. From our perspective, the thing that we felt was sort of a bold storytelling choice is the fact that you could just go and kill anybody in the game, just like you could, if you are a sociopath, and a Quest givers asking for help, and you’re like, you know what, I’m bored, I’m just gonna pop you in the head. We wanted you to be able to do that and the reason why you are able to do that is because we felt that in VR, it’s a unique environment where it feels strange to have an unkillable NPC. You’re there, you have a gun, unless you’re like in a sci fi setting where they have some sort of forcefield I should be able to shoot you and so we wanted to really make it that grounded in reality, we wanted it to be like if there’s someone that we shoot, and they don’t die right away, there should be a reason. Maybe they have a riot shield. Maybe they have a vest protecting them from the bullets, but like, it has to be logical, or it has to fit within the very realistic world of The Walking Dead, other than the full zombies. But like, that was sort of the place we started in the blocks that we built upon to create the experience and I think people really appreciate it, like you can see going YouTube and look at videos of their game, people have a really good time just sort of coming up with their own roleplay scenarios with the inhabitants of our world, because we give you such like, ultimate freedom and so like, there’s all these concepts that play together, like player fragility is another big one, which is we didn’t want you to be sort of this like gung ho hero. There’s some games out there where you feel, then that’s awesome. But we wanted you to feel like you were always in danger and you’re always sort of a fragile person and so people have been destroyed. They’re like, Oh, man, I feel like an old man. It’s like running out of breath and like malnourished and like, yeah, you’re in the apocalypse. You’ve been eating like Cheetos and like Twinkies, and like you’re carrying heavy gear around, and it’s hot and sticky. Like, what do you think is gonna happen? You’re gonna run and walkers are constantly on you. So that’s generally I think that a lot of people appreciate that and seems like the kick into the wall.
Norman 24:35
Well, Cheetos and Twinkies are still part of my meal as part of my diet.
Guy 24:41
Hey, listen, I’m not saying that it can’t be part of your diet. I’m just saying that if you rely on them for sustenance for many months at a time, I think you’ll probably see some results.
Norman 24:52
I do. But anyways, Guy, I want to talk to you about a quote. Either something that you live by, or something that you’ve made up, but you got a quote for us?
Guy 25:08
I thought about this a lot, and there’s quite a few quotes that I really enjoy. But there’s one that like, lately, I’ve been thinking about a lot, because there’s a bunch of, the gaming industry is a pretty volatile industry. I’ve had some friends that have essentially, like, lost the job that they were working on for a long time that they were really in love with and I’ve had acquaintances, you never know when a project will end or when you’ll decide that like, things aren’t right for you and that’s generally a good advice for any career. In general, my approach, I think that the earlier you realize that the work you are in, no matter how much you love it, is just part of your career the better. It’s very easy when you’re kind of going from one role to another to sort of get down on yourself and so the quote that I leave you is actually a Frank Sinatra quote, which is one of my favorites, and it says, “The best revenge is massive success” and I think I’m quoting it correctly, you can go ahead and follow me. But the idea behind that, that I think is very powerful. I was using it for a friend that recently left the institution. It was not treating her very well, and she was just starting her own business. I think that everyone should really keep these words to heart, it’s like, the focus should be what am I doing today. Every time a relationship ends, and something new starts, it’s exciting. Every time you’ve decided there’s a next chapter in your life, you should be super excited about it, because you get to create the next step and there’s two sorts of realities of that. One is you will tell yourself, it was the right decision, like your memory is something that you create and that is, as we know, at least in part subjective, so eventually, you’ll convince yourself that that was the right move. So you’ll feel better about it. But on top of it, focusing on what you’re doing on the future is what’s going to make that, it’s going to make your future more successful and that is the best sort of trail to lead across your career and so that’s the words of encouragement that I’ve used to anyone that’s in the middle of a career transition, or, like, stuck somewhere that they’re not enjoying and trying to figure out what’s next. In the end, like, another thing I used to always tell people that were having trouble with their work was, listen, every moment that you spend doing something that you don’t love is way more damaging to you than to the company. Company is always able to sort of weather a little bit of deadweight here and weather a little bit of efficiency here and there. But an individual only has so much time in their life. So that’s my other sort of angle on it, which is like, always think about what you’re doing and is it exactly what you want to be doing? Or should you be like thinking about what that is? Because otherwise, the biggest time wasted, and the biggest cost is to you.
Norman 28:06
Hey, I love it. Thanks for those words of wisdom.
Guy 28:09
Hopefully, I picked something up through my slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Norman 28:14
I mean, I really liked it. Yeah, and I might be telling a few other people who bought that Frank Sinatra quote, too.
Guy 28:22
It’s a good one. It’s uplifting.
Norman 28:26
Now, one of the reasons why we put together this podcast, Hayden myself, a lot of people that I know, just got tired of getting bombarded with these stupid success Facebook ads, wherever you were looking, Instagram, make money online, you see some guy in front of a Lamborghini flashing money, and what it doesn’t show, it’s the hurdles. How that person or how that entrepreneur became successful and I mean, that’s a major missing link. So we always like to ask, Do you have any hurdles that you have to overcome? What were they? How did you get out of it and what did you learn from it?
Guy 29:08
Yeah, well, I have one story that I like to tell, which is my absolute favorite, because it’s the first time that I learned that people will talk you into something that is like, career destroying, and they won’t necessarily do it because they’re trying to harm you. They’ll just do it because they think you’re really good at something, and they will just set you up for failure and that’s something I think everybody should look out for. Because if you’re not constantly thinking of, can I actually do this and does this thing that I have now said yes, is this just going to be the end of my career and the reason I bring it up is because when you’re young and early in your career, not necessarily young but like early in your career, you are sort of wide eyed and you’re eager and want to prove yourself and that, to me is the moment where you’re most at risk to sign for something that you can’t deliver, and listen, I don’t say don’t be ambitious, you should be ambitious, you should be trying to do things that are just outside your reach so you can grow. But you should also have a good read on whether or not those things are actually possible, or whether or not you’re setting yourself up for failure and in general, like being able to say no, and I know it’s sort of a cliche, but it’s actually an important thing and so that the story is so I was doing really hot at this company and builds all these tech support centers and we were really able to solve a lot of keep customer satisfaction high, solve a lot of tech problems really quickly and so they said, you know what? we’re going to put you in charge of this initiative called the root cause analysis initiative and it’s going to be like, you’re going to find the problems in the company all over the company and you’re going to find the cause and get rid of the cause so they go away forever and at the time, I was like, Oh wow, that sounds amazing and of course, anybody that has is an adult, and has spent any time in any company, or, is the parent is like that, you’re never going to accomplish that and you are setting yourself up for a world of hurt. Because like, there, first of all, there’s always going to be new problems. But the outcome of that note was somewhat surprising is not only was finding the problems within the issue, and finding root causes is easy, I actually bring that sort of problem solving machine and so that was actually not hard. But the human element, I was completely oblivious to, people didn’t want to know what the cause of the problem was. They wanted the problems to go away. But they don’t want to be pointed out as the department that had caused the problem and or the piece of technology that was causing the problem that was built by this individual, they hated that. So they hated me. So that is tremendous. I recommend nobody ever take that or if they take it, like have a lot of caveats and things in place to predict what’s going to happen and in general, that was a really big learning experience for me. I also sort of understood a lot about like, one of the things that is when you have certain strengths, and certain weaknesses, if you have a good mentor and a good leader, they will tell you to focus on your strengths, because they will give you the most results. Some people will point out your weaknesses and say you need to really work on them and you may need to work on some of your weaknesses, but you’ll always get better returns out of your strengths and this is again, another cliche, but definitely something worth remembering. Because you’re just gonna like your investments like you don’t want to pump a bunch of money into something that is not working out just in the hope that it’ll turn around. Bring other people in. Admit when you’re there’s things you’re not good at and sometimes, you have to show vulnerability by doing that. But generally, you telling people that you’re bad at something will result in them respecting you more, not about the fact that you know that you’re bad at something and usually people don’t like to see other people suffer, they’ll usually like, help them and do what they can to help you out of the situation. So I think that one other thing that I find really important is the lesson out of that is that is try to not do it all yourself, right? Like, understand what you’re good at and when you’re not and wrote people be like, Hey, listen, I signed up for this thing, that seems way too big for me, I need your help for this, because this, I can’t do this myself and you’ll find that people will become more collaborative. Like that’s been my experience at least and I also, I will say, I’ll give you a personal anecdote too, which is something that me and my wife have learned over time together and she is a skeptic and I’m sort of the guy who gets excited about stuff. So it’s great to like wanting to have a counterpoint to your personality. As a person who gets excited about things, I’m generally the guy but yeah, let’s sign up for this time show. I think it’s a good idea.
Guy 33:48
Like, you have instant regret, like 10 hours later, you’re like, what did I just sign up? So, the lesson there is, just be aware of your weak points and your blind spots and like, complement them with people that are able to pull you back from the brink. Because I think that that is generally very helpful and I got reminded of it because you mentioned the whole like a rich, successful guy with a nice car and house that he probably rented on Airbnb. My perspective on that is usually, like getting to a feeling of Wow, I’m really in a good spot that like, I really like I want to sort of figure out how to keep doing this. It was a 15 year journey for me, like 15 years of questioning yourself and like, Am I really doing what I love, or why I really suck at this and even today, I’ll be like doing something I’ll be like, this is terrible. Just like, you’re never going to get rid of it completely. But you’ll get to a point where you can sort of turn corners and be like, Alright, this stuff, I was really responsible for this and it was good. Okay, I can deal with that and it sort of works against the imposter syndrome, right and simultaneously, you start noticing that other people, like generally people who are really great at their craft, don’t think they’re really good at their craft. They think that their right and then they’re just slaving at it to try to get better and this is a generalization, right? Like just people that are otherwise and some people are naturally talented, and they know they’re naturally talented. But in general, like people try to reinvent themselves and are usually pretty, I find that the people that I like to work with are people who are very aware of their shortcomings and things like that.
Norman 35:35
I like to learn a bit more about your successes, your biggest success, what would that be?
Guy 35:41
Well, it’s tough because there’s a couple of things that I’m proud of in my career. I think that one of the things, the first things that I’m really proud of, I don’t think I call it my biggest success, but it was like we created the first scholarship for playing video games in a University. I’m still to this day, incredibly proud of the fact that it was actually the brainchild of a person that worked for me called Steve Jaworski, and a guy named Chris Wyatt, the three of us were like, Alright, we should, we definitely want to reward people in school for playing League of Legends and we want to pay them because like, it feels right to pay them. But if you tell that to the school, they’re gonna hate that. So we should make it a scholarship, and then they’ll love it. So that’s the route we took, and so that’s how we created the first League of Legend scholarship. Now, that’s what I really loved about Riot, I think we did some other stuff there that I really enjoyed, which was sort of kind, letting players get together and gather and create their own events. I really, really learned a ton from I mean, this trailer and CD project for the games went, I learned a lot from that was like one of the first like CG trailers that I was asked to own and to end and I personally think I was like, really bad at it. But I was at a stage in my career where I was, I knew enough to ask for help and I received the help and the people that helped me like ended up making a really great piece and then I used a lot of that knowledge in my work for guidance and I think that the launch, like what we’ve done this year with Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, is like one of the proudest things that I have in my career. Because I feel like I finally was sort of like in the driver’s seat of, alright, end to end, we’re going to decide how to bring this game to market, we’re going to design all of that, we’re going to put the right team together and then we’ll take it to market multiple platforms, we’re going to time it correctly and we’re going to work with these great people and it kind of all came together as a nice symphony and I’m really happy with it. Not just because it’s where I am currently, but because it sort of felt like all the lessons from my career came together and helped me do things faster, like more efficiently to in a space that was relatively unexplored and where I felt like the things that we said about the game like I would, I am very glad to have the conversation with any player and get to see the players experiences. It’s really been awesome. So hopefully, it doesn’t feel too much. Like I’m just plugging my game, but that was definitely the trajectory of it.
Norman 38:23
Yeah, I mean, when we were talking about getting on to the podcast, the game was there, but I’ve learned so much about it and that’s the key. Like, I think the audience is going to love the information that you’ve provided. I really, first of all, I’m going to go and thank Nate for making the connection because I’ve really liked this podcast. This is a subject I’m not familiar with. But I really, I’m serious. I got to get one of these VR games and start batting around my TV.
Guy 38:59
Yeah, go get the Quest 2 man. It’s like it’s the right time to get it.
Norman 39:03
Absolutely. But anyways, look, if people want to reach out or to make contact with you, how do they do that?
Guy 39:12
I’m like, pretty open on LinkedIn. Just send me a message on LinkedIn. I’m glad to answer. I also, as part of what I’ve done simultaneously to my work as guidance, I advise a lot of startups in the spaces that I feel like I’m relatively well suited to advise in. So I’m very open to having business conversations with people regardless of whether or not I’ll end up doing anything with them. So, Guy Constantini, I think I’m the first Google result because of my weird last name and so, you can just message me on LinkedIn, and I gladly answer questions. Just be patient with me because I get to them chronologically.
Norman 39:53
Yeah, fantastic. So look at the end of every podcast, we always turn to our guests and we ask them, Do they know a guy?
Guy 40:04
Yeah. So I actually think that I would recommend a couple of people think that there’s this really nice lady that works with me called Amy and she is currently our head of community. But she’s also the chairperson for women in Games International, which is an organization that focuses on sort of the great women that work in the videogame field and sort of elevating the status of women across our industry, which is actually pretty male dominated one. Still, I don’t even understand how she does what she does. She’s a very impressive person. She does those two things, and also is a mom in COVID and it’s just that she’s able to still like not fall all her hair out. So I definitely like to recommend her. I also have a couple other people that I have in mind when I think about more, and I will let you know about it.
Norman 40:53
Perfect. That’s fantastic. So Guy and see, I didn’t say gee once.
Guy 40:59
Yeah, you used to say it. You said it all those times in prep, and that he got it out of the way.
Norman 41:06
I think just before you came onto the call, and you were saying just think of me as a guy. Okay, I got it. But anyways, Thank you, sir. I really appreciate you coming on to the podcast today and like I said, I learned a lot about VR. Thank you so much.
Guy 41:23
Thank you. Have a great one. Thank you for having me. This is fun.
Norman 41:27
Alright. Until next time.
Guy 41:29
Bye.
Hayden 41:33
That concludes part two of our interview with Guy Costantini. Tune in next time to hear our interview with Mariannita Luzzati. She’s a world renowned visual artist, based out of both London and Sao Paulo. She’s also put together a program that brings music and visual art into the prisons in Brazil. We’re gonna talk a lot about that. As always, make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast and if you’re on social media, we’d love to hear from you. I don’t have very many friends on Facebook, so I need people to talk to, please help. Anyway, that’s enough for me, and I’ll see you next time.
