Radio Free Decipher/Episode 12 transcript
Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 12 (2 April 1999) is the first of two interviews with Decipher product development leads Jerry Darcy and Bill Martinson, recorded as Young Jedi was being finished, about five weeks before its release, and while Endor was in development. Participants: Carol Wisely (host), Jerry Darcy, Bill Martinson, and Calvin (Decipher web programmer). Speaker turns are inferred from the captions.
Source: Broadcast 12 - Radio Free Decipher (02 April, 1999): Bill Martinson, Jerry Darcy on PD (Part 1), Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 20 February 2022; originally released 2 April 1999). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript
[00:02] Carol Wisely: Hi, this is Carol Wisely with Radio Free Decipher, and I'm coming to you from the offices in Norfolk. I apologize for missing last week. I and most of the marketing team were away at the Game Manufacturers Association annual conference down in Las Vegas, so we lost a lot of money, and we talked with an awful lot of retailers. And it's an exciting time for the CCG industry. Obviously Pokémon is doing very well at the moment, and there was a lot of excitement about our upcoming product, Young Jedi, the Young Jedi Collectible Card Game, which, believe it or not, is going to be on the shelves in about five or six weeks, before the movie, and that's an unbelievable fact. All of us have been so busy working on it here that we've not noticed the approaching time, and now we realize that it's almost upon us.
[00:46] Carol Wisely: You guys don't know very much about it yet. We've released almost nothing, and that's because of the Lucasfilm policies on privacy and secrecy before this great movie, and I guess I'm not going to be able to tell you many secrets today. But I am going to be spending some time talking with Jerry Darcy and Bill Martinson, both guys that I know you know well. Jerry Darcy has been with Decipher for about three and a half, four—no, four years now, longer than I have, and he's the lead designer for Star Wars. And what does that mean, Jerry?
[01:28] Jerry Darcy: That basically means that Chuck Kallenbach, Tom Lischke and Mike Reynolds will come up with card ideas, and I'll tell them what's wrong with them.
[01:38] Carol Wisely: Yeah, I've heard them talk about that. Sometimes they'll spend weeks working on card ideas and then you don't like any of them.
[01:44] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, well, I know that's not true.
[01:46] Carol Wisely: Bill's not here with us yet, so I'm going to start by talking with Jerry, and seamlessly at some point in the broadcast we'll edit Bill in, and none of you out there will notice any difference—that's if he turns up, of course. So, Jerry, I persuaded you at short notice to come and talk to me about Young Jedi, and I know you're feeling a little trepidatious about what you can and can't say. So I'm going to spend the next half an hour or so trying to get everything out of you, and you've got to spend the next half an hour or so not telling me anything.
[02:15] Jerry Darcy: But I'll see what I can do.
[02:17] Carol Wisely: First of all, is it finished completely?
[02:19] Jerry Darcy: Yes. The gameplay for all the cards is pretty much set. We have all the cards on a big spreadsheet, and we've done a lot of advance work even on the expansions for Young Jedi, so we've got a lot of the work done.
[02:33] Carol Wisely: Well, I believe the first expansion's at the printer as we speak—
[02:36] Jerry Darcy: [unclear]
[02:37] Carol Wisely: —so I guess it's too late to change anything there. I know it's going to be real tight to hit the shelves when we intend to. But are you excited?
[02:58] Jerry Darcy: Oh, yeah. I'm very excited for the game to be out there for people to be playing. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
[03:03] Carol Wisely: Now, did you feel any kind of disloyalty to the game that you've worked on for years, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game, the classic game, working on something new?
[03:13] Jerry Darcy: Partially. Actually, it wasn't disloyalty so much as jealousy. As I was working on Young Jedi, Tom and Chuck and Mike got to keep working on the classic game, and I would eventually get to come in and see what they were doing, and I got very jealous of all the fun they got to have, because they had lines and lines of text and all sorts of things that were different from what I could be working on.
[03:39] Carol Wisely: So you were like the proud parent who sees that little child go off to somebody else to be looked after.
[03:46] Jerry Darcy: Pretty much, yeah. You have to let go. Very hard to let go.
[03:50] Carol Wisely: Well, I know that you're going to be involved again in Endor as it comes to its closing stages, but that's a new process for you, not to be in there all the way through, I guess.
[03:58] Jerry Darcy: Yeah. I got to sit down with Tom and Chuck and Mike towards the beginning and work out what the general themes were going to be, what the general gameplay mechanisms were going to be, and they've done a lot of the implementation for that, and I've pretty much just been reviewing what they've been doing.
[04:15] Carol Wisely: Well, before I ask you more about Young Jedi, just tell me: are you excited about Endor?
[04:19] Jerry Darcy: Oh, yeah. Tom and Chuck and Mike have done a great job. They've come up with a lot of neat cards, and a lot of cards that are going to, I think, have a really good effect on the environment that's out there. It's just some really good stuff, and that, along with some of our other products, it's going to be really great.
[04:41] Carol Wisely: Plenty of Ewoks?
[04:42] Jerry Darcy: Oh, yeah.
[04:43] Carol Wisely: I'm in the anti-Ewok camp. I know everybody's in the [pro]-Ewok camp except me, so I'm really going to enjoy playing Dark Side come the release date.
[04:54] Jerry Darcy: Come May.
[04:55] Carol Wisely: Yeah, that's what I'm telling people, May.
[04:57] Jerry Darcy: Hopefully we can make May with Endor. We're excited about it too. It's going to be a great set.
[05:04] Carol Wisely: Jerry, I've also heard all the talk and discussion, and I've seen some of the posts of the so-called Endor spoiler that's out there. Have you got any comments on that?
[05:13] Jerry Darcy: I remember a while back, when we had, I think it was Dagobah or Cloud City, someone did a spoiler list out there, a card list of all the cards that were in the set, and they put in a bunch of quotes. And I think it was Cloud City; they put in Lando and Lobot and all these other characters. And odds are you're going to get a lot of it right, because you're drawing from the same source that we are. So it's got to be very hard to tell the real leaks from the fake leaks.
[05:46] Carol Wisely: But it's not the real spoiler?
[05:48] Jerry Darcy: No, no.
[05:49] Carol Wisely: Well, we pretty much knew that. But I guess if you sit down and write a spoiler that's got Ewoks and Han and Leia and Luke and those big walky things, then you're going to hit some nails on the head.
[06:02] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, you're going to be at least close to the mark, so it can look real.
[06:08] Carol Wisely: So it's like the script for Episode One that was floating around months and months ago, which turned out not to be correct. I remember that, and I think the Insurrection script was out there as well, and that also turned out not to be correct. Okay, let's get back to Young Jedi. Before we do that: how excited are you about the movie?
[06:31] Jerry Darcy: Oh, I can't wait. The stuff that we have gotten to see because of our relationship with Lucasfilm has just been incredible, and I really can't wait to see it all pieced together, and just to have that movie experience with it. I'm just really looking forward to it.
[06:53] Carol Wisely: And having seen as much as you have, you don't feel it spoils the experience for you at all?
[06:57] Jerry Darcy: Not really. It's fun to go through the trailer and be sitting there knowing what the context is for each individual scene that's there, and getting to see, oh, this is how that's going to look, and this is how that's going to look. So it's just incredible.
[07:19] Carol Wisely: Good. Well, I'm excited too. So let's get back to Young Jedi. When did you wrap, from a PD point of view?
[07:28] Jerry Darcy: Fairly recently. We'd finished the cards a while back, but Art was still working on a lot of the images. We've fairly recently, though, finished working on the rules, getting those finalized, edited and off to the printers.
[07:48] Carol Wisely: Does it have a 140-page glossary?
[07:51] Jerry Darcy: No.
[07:52] Carol Wisely: Do you think it ever will?
[07:54] Jerry Darcy: No, no, I don't think so.
[07:57] Carol Wisely: There's been some talk—I mean, we've obviously made suggestions that this is a much simpler game than the classic Star Wars. So what can you say about that?
[08:09] Jerry Darcy: It's going to be sort of a good pickup game. During Star Wars tournaments that I've been to, people will be sitting around for 10, 15 minutes, and this is something you can do in between rounds in a tournament. This is something that you can do if you just have a small amount of free time here and there. It's that kind of game. It's not like our regular classic game, where it can be an involved, drawn-out game. So it's a different experience than the classic game.
[08:46] Carol Wisely: Good. And I don't think I've asked you yet: do you like it?
[08:50] Jerry Darcy: Oh, yeah. When we were testing the game and we were having other people sit down and play the game—usually what I do during playtests is I walk around and pace and make sure that everything's going well, but I would just sit down and play with some of the testers, and whenever anyone had a question, just stop what I was doing, go help them out, come back and keep playing, because I just genuinely enjoy the game.
[09:22] Carol Wisely: That's great. I know I've been in a couple of playtests, and I've enjoyed playing against you. I'm not sure I've beaten you yet, even though I think I'm going to be a pretty good Young Jedi player, because I found it very, very easy to learn, but it's still very involving.
[09:38] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, the time to learn the game is very short. Once you have some of the basic mechanisms down, it's going to be fairly simple to learn. It's just that how to play, when to play the cards, when to do your strategies—that's going to be where a lot of the depth and the variety of gameplay is going to come in. So the initial learning of the game is going to be simple, but it's going to be fun to explore the different ways you can play the cards.
[10:13] Carol Wisely: Does it feel true to the story?
[10:16] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, I think it does. It's taking place at a lot of different locations, and there's lots of different characters you can play, and—I don't know what else I probably [can say]. Not very much, actually. Lots of things happen and blow up.
[10:36] Carol Wisely: I know that's important to Warren and important to this company, that our games are faithful to the property on which they're based.
[10:44] Jerry Darcy: Absolutely.
[10:45] Carol Wisely: And I think, from what I've experienced and heard, we've achieved that with Star Trek, we've achieved it with the classic Star Wars game, and you think we've achieved it with this one too.
[10:57] Jerry Darcy: Yeah.
[10:58] Carol Wisely: That's great, particularly in a game that is intended to be simpler.
[11:02] Jerry Darcy: Yeah. Actually, it was interesting working on a game that was simpler. I actually found it more of a challenge to be working on a simple game than working on more complicated games.
[11:13] Carol Wisely: Well, yeah, because you couldn't just do another 10 pages of glossary to explain how to do whatever it is you were trying to do. Good. Well, let's focus a little bit more on Young Jedi. What do you think of the name?
[11:29] Jerry Darcy: I think it's fairly appropriate, both for the larger market that I think is going to be interested in the game, as well as focusing on the characters that we're focused on in the game.
[11:51] Carol Wisely: Great. I'm very comfortable with it; it's a nice, comfortable title. And do the cards look like our current classic cards?
[11:58] Jerry Darcy: They look different than our current cards.
[12:02] Carol Wisely: Would you tell the difference if you put them down on the table?
[12:05] Jerry Darcy: Oh, yeah. Real fast. It's just a very different template. It's got a different feel to the card. You can't tell me any more—
[12:16] Carol Wisely: I know, I know. I'm trying here, folks, but it's difficult for poor Jerry. Okay, well, that brings me to another subject that I really do want to touch on today, because we've had a lot of questions coming in via email, via the website, and also when I'm out on the road talking with retailers they pass them on from their customers: how come we did not make something that was compatible with our current game? I have some answers for that, but I also want to explore what you think about that.
[12:51] Jerry Darcy: Well, one of the first things that leaps to mind is that the classic game focuses on the conflict between the Rebellion and the Empire, and I remember Warren saying very early on that that's just not a part of Episode One. So without those two elements, there's no way that the cards could be compatible. And then there's the other aspect of the time difference in terms of the stories. The characters are vastly different ages. It just wouldn't make any sense to have characters in one arena performing actions like blowing up the Death Star and things like that in the classic game. It just wouldn't make any sense for that to function that way.
[13:38] Carol Wisely: So you feel it would have been compromising the richness of the new movie, and compromising the strength of the old, to try and fit them together?
[13:48] Jerry Darcy: It would have violated both storylines. It would have been to the detriment of both universes. So I think keeping them separate was what we had to do.
[13:59] Carol Wisely: I agree with you, and I think that when people see Young Jedi and play it, they'll realize why we did that, and also that we really didn't have any choice. But it is on a lot of people's minds at the moment, and I guess the message that we need to get out to them is that Young Jedi is a new game, but the classic Star Wars Customizable Card Game is still going strong. And I know, Jerry, you have a lot lined up for the classic game as well.
[14:28] Jerry Darcy: Yeah. We keep saying this, and people say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but tell me what. And I wish we could.
[14:34] Carol Wisely: But I've seen some of the concepts that are coming down the pipe, and I'm excited. Well, Bill has joined us now. I'm not going to ask him where he's been, but he's slipped in and donned a pair of earphones here and found a microphone. So, morning, Bill.
[14:51] Bill Martinson: Good morning.
[14:52] Carol Wisely: Tell me, when did you finish working on Young Jedi?
[14:55] Bill Martinson: Am I finished working on Young Jedi? Yeah, I guess I am. I hope so. We've just finished up a couple of the last details just in the last few days: some printing issues, a couple of last-minute things with rules. So we're really just right now at the end of our part of the production process.
[15:12] Carol Wisely: How long have you guys been working on this?
[15:14] Bill Martinson: Oh, weeks and months. Since October.
[15:17] Carol Wisely: Yeah, a long time. Not 100% of the time, I know, because there's been other stuff coming out since then—The Dominion, for example—
[15:23] Bill Martinson: Right.
[15:24] Carol Wisely: —which I know wouldn't come out without your blessing, Bill. Anything Trek. But did I tell you I went on the Experience again last week?
[15:31] Bill Martinson: Oh, no.
[15:32] Carol Wisely: And it was way more fun. Everything worked this time.
[15:35] Bill Martinson: Yeah, that's a lot better when it works.
[15:37] Carol Wisely: It was awesome. Anyway, sorry, guys, I'll get back to the story here and to the interview. So, do you feel relieved? Do you miss it? Is it strange? Is it like when a play wraps and the actors don't know where to go the next day?
[15:52] Bill Martinson: Well, it is a little bit, except in this case now we get to go sit in the audience and watch the play. Now we get to sit and wait for the cards and then actually play and use them, instead of using the mock-ups. So it's not so much missing the process as it is now just kind of the anticipation to actually get the cards. I know they're going to be so gorgeous. I just can't wait to have a binder for those cards.
[16:20] Carol Wisely: Well, I saw some yesterday, and I must admit I've not had that bug, that urge to collect, desperately for some time—ever since I stopped getting Beanie Babies. I thought I'd managed to go through the 12-step program and stop being a collector, but it looks like I'm going to be one again. Let's talk a little bit about collecting, because I've been talking a lot with Jerry about gameplay this morning, not getting much detail, but trying my hardest to crack. He's a very hard nut to crack.
[16:51] Jerry Darcy: I do my best.
[16:52] Carol Wisely: But I also have heard so much talk around the office from people who've seen this about collecting. We've a lot of collectors here as well as a lot of players. So tell me, is it going to be an easy product to collect?
[17:05] Bill Martinson: Yeah, I think it will be. The set size will be a bit smaller than what people are accustomed to in classic Star Wars, and I think the rarity distribution will be a little bit easier for people to get a set, with a little bit of trading. And we've also really enhanced the collector's elements in this, more so than in any of our previous games. We have a lot of really nice features specifically for collectors, such as rarity icons, and the cards are all numbered, so you know exactly which cards you have and what you're missing in your sequence in your binder. There'll be an expansion set icon for each of the expansion sets, so you can tell which set they come from. And all of those elements are integrated very closely together on a card, in a way that really complements the gameplay elements of the card without cluttering them up. So I think collectors are just going to love Young Jedi, even if they don't want to play it, which I personally can't fathom, because it's a really fun game to play. But yeah, I do think this is really our magnum opus in terms of collectible things.
[18:10] Carol Wisely: Well, wherever I go—and I travel a lot—I meet tons of people who have collected Star Wars Customizable Card Game and Star Trek Customizable Card Game and never played it. It's amazing. And in fact we have Calvin over in the corner waving his hand there—Calvin, our web programmer, who's recording this session for us. He's also a collector. I didn't realize that, Calvin.
[18:34] Calvin: Me too, actually. I have the entire Q Continuum, because I really like that John de Lancie guy, and I collected the entire set, and I'm not a Star Trek player. I'm a little bit of a Star Wars player.
[18:47] Bill Martinson: We'll change that.
[18:48] Calvin: I'm looking forward to Blaze of Glory. I really am looking forward to it. I've got a thing about Klingons. [Laughter]
[18:57] Carol Wisely: Well, that's very good. I've heard rumors and stuff, and I know some stuff about the collectability that I'm not going to go into today, because even though there are a lot of leaks out there on the internet at the moment, I think there are some surprises in Young Jedi, and I'd like to try and keep some surprises. But this is going to be a great collector's product. And I think the fact, as you say, it's a smaller set size, the expansions are going to be closer together—are they all going to be 130 or 140 cards?
[19:28] Bill Martinson: 140 cards per expansion, three expansions, and there may be some things beyond that we really don't know yet, in terms of a premium card here or there. But right now that's really the program: three 140-card sets—
[19:43] Carol Wisely: 340 cards in total?
[19:45] Bill Martinson: Oh, sorry—three times 140, so about 420 cards.
[19:50] Carol Wisely: Right. Well, that's good. And the first one is 130 or 140—I've not had that confirmed yet, but I guess you guys know. And that's plenty to make lots of variety in playing.
[20:03] Bill Martinson: Oh, yeah. The model we have for this game is a very simple model at its core, but it has a lot of gameplay variety in the combinations that you bring out and the characters you choose. There's quite a bit of deck-building variety.
[20:23] Carol Wisely: Okay. And now, who else worked on this product? I know that you two guys, particularly in recent weeks, have been almost impossible to find. I know Warren has been very involved; obviously the art department, who I will interview at a later date when we can actually show some stuff, because it's really hard to talk about art when you can't show anything. But who else, from a development point of view? How does that process work?
[20:48] Bill Martinson: We've really had just about everybody involved in the product development team, and Warren, and we've even stolen some of your guys from time to time to do some playtesting with us. So we've had a lot of people involved in the process, and Tom and Rollie have been a big part of that process, of course. So it's really been a group effort. We've tried to keep Tim out of that, so he can always keep the torch going on Star Trek, and I've snuck out and been involved in that process too. But we've really had a lot of people involved in Young Jedi development.
[21:22] Carol Wisely: Well, I'm going to interview and talk with Tom and Rollie later on. Can you and Jerry perhaps describe their part in that process? People don't know Tom and Rollie quite so well out there, because they're not on our internet site very much, but we do interview them every now and again. But the classic game, the Star Trek game and now Young Jedi owe a great legacy to Tom and Rollie. Can you just illuminate that for our listeners?
[21:47] Jerry Darcy: Well, they came up with a lot of the original gameplay mechanisms that have made it through the process of the game. They did a lot of the foundational work, which Bill and I and the others built on. So they really did a lot of the core work. It's been a group effort—we all had input on the core design—but they were the ones that suggested some of the really interesting mechanisms that made it through, and we kept them for the duration of the development process.
[22:28] Carol Wisely: Great. Well, it's going to be fun talking with them. Jerry, I'm going to sidetrack here and tell a little anecdote—or rather, you can tell a little anecdote. When you first came to Decipher, you actually didn't come to work for Decipher, did you? You came to work with Tom.
[22:41] Jerry Darcy: That's right. I worked for Technical Game Services, which was the company that Tom and Rollie had together.
[22:50] Carol Wisely: So tell me about your first day.
[22:53] Jerry Darcy: Well, I had interviewed in, I think it was March, and my first day of work was April 14th, 1995. And I think I got my actual "yes, you're hired" call on about April the 1st, so I didn't have very much time to move out here. And when I got out here, all I had was a bike, and I could just bike to Tom's apartment and work on his computer there. And when I showed up for my first day—of course, he was moving here from Seattle, and I was moving here from Cincinnati—I showed up for my first day of work and knocked on his door, and there was no answer. And it suddenly occurred to me that I'd gotten my "yes, you're hired" phone call on April the 1st.
[23:44] Jerry Darcy: And it was about a four- or five-mile bike ride, and it was a particularly hot spring, so I was exhausted and wandering around with my bike, and I thought, did I get the wrong apartment? So I waited around for about half an hour and just started postulating that I might be the victim of the worst prank ever. You know: "Sure, we'll hire you for a game company. Yeah, come on out here, you can come to Virginia Beach." So I waited around for about half an hour, and Tom showed up. The moving company was late delivering his stuff. So we walked into his apartment, and he said, "Well, I don't have anything yet, no computer set up for you to work on. I guess you can go home." And I kind of looked back at how hot it was. So that was my first day of work.
[24:47] Carol Wisely: I love that story. Do you still let him have glasses of water once in a while? I love that story; that's one of my favorite Jerry stories. I'm going to talk to you guys again next week, and I'm also going to be talking with Tom and Rollie. I'll be tracking the artists down when we reach the stage of being able to show some cards. And because of the secrecy surrounding the movie, this is a game that's going to be on sale before we've really been able to tell people very much of it at all, so it's going to be an exploration [unclear].