Radio Free Decipher/Episode 13 transcript
Radio Free Decipher Broadcast 13 (9 April 1999) is the second of two interviews with Decipher product development leads Jerry Darcy and Bill Martinson about Young Jedi: Warren Holland's role, designing a card game before The Phantom Menace was released, why Young Jedi is not compatible with the Star Wars CCG, and its deck-building system. Participants: Carol Wisely (host), Jerry Darcy, Bill Martinson. Speaker turns are inferred from the captions.
Source: Broadcast 13 - Radio Free Decipher (09 April, 1999): Bill Martinson, Jerry Darcy on PD (Part 2), Player's Council, YouTube (uploaded 20 February 2022; originally released 9 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: Well, I'm back here again with Bill and Jerry in the second of our two interviews about Young Jedi. Hi, guys. How's the last week been? Has it been strange being away from your baby?
[00:12] Bill Martinson: It's been a little bit different. It's been a very odd week.
[00:16] Jerry Darcy: Yeah. But we're a week nearer to the movie, we're a week nearer to Young Jedi, so it's fun.
[00:24] Carol Wisely: Good. Well, okay, we'll get going. Let's get back to Young Jedi. I wanted to mention Tom and Rollie, and I'll be talking to them at a future date, because I know it's a really interesting process that you guys all go through, when they work on certain aspects of the concept and then it all comes together, and I'm not sure how many people out there realize that. And they played a big part in Young Jedi, so we'll be talking to them, and also to Warren, of course. Where does Warren fit into the process?
[00:51] Bill Martinson: Well, Warren, as always, defines and drives the creative vision for just about everything we do. Young Jedi was really Warren's conception. It was his vision all along, back in the beginning, before any of us really even understood what a wonderful product Young Jedi could be. He sort of just saw it all in the beginning and has shepherded it along throughout the entire process. He's been very involved in the gameplay, been very involved in the visual design of the cards. I mean, when you look at these cards and when you see how spectacular they are, and when you just say, wow, I've never seen collectible card game cards that look like this before—just thank Warren, because he really has been there. The joke he always makes about himself is the "unreasonable standard of excellence". I mean, he really demanded the unreasonable and made it happen, and so now we're all going to get to enjoy that.
[01:44] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, he's been referred to kind of as the Renaissance man of Decipher. He gets involved in the gameplay, and then starts working on the art, and then works on all the technical details of printing and so on and so forth. So he really drove where the gameplay needed to be and where the art needed to be, and scheduling and all sorts of things. So he's been pretty much the focal point for the game.
[02:11] Carol Wisely: And you've been pulling a few all-nighters recently.
[02:14] Bill Martinson: Oh, yeah, a few. We've had a lot of long hours to bring this all together, but I think it's really been worth it. My personal feeling is we have a really great marriage of gameplay and collectibility and Star Wars imagery and detail and a little bit of backstory, and all these elements coming together in a really nice blend that probably nobody thought was possible except Warren. So he's really the one that everyone will need to thank for just what a great blend this product is going to be.
[02:46] Carol Wisely: Do you think we'll get a raise after all?
[02:48] Bill Martinson: I'm trying really hard to suck up as much as I possibly can here, so I hope he's listening.
[02:53] Carol Wisely: I'm going to make sure he does. You should see the faces of the marketing department at the moment. I didn't think Marcus could roll his eyes back that far. No, I think it's nice for people to understand what goes on in this kind of process, when it's so easy to look at a handful of cards and enjoy them but have no understanding of what's behind all that. Now, one of the major differences this time is that you've been working on a product that is associated with a movie that doesn't yet exist. Has that been very different?
[03:30] Bill Martinson: Oh, yeah. It's been a real challenge. It's a bit of a moving target, because, as Jerry says, we've been working on this product since last fall, and last fall a lot of elements of the film were still in flux. Just like our card game changes and evolves as we're getting to the end of the process, the film evolved and changed in little ways as George Lucas was getting to the end of his process. So we never really saw the big picture at any given point as we were moving along. So it was a real challenge to work hand-in-hand with Lucas on an almost daily basis to make sure that we were representing the film faithfully, and having the level of detail and realism and canonicity that we like to have in all of our games. So it really has been a challenge to basically create this entire card game before we've really seen the film.
[04:28] Jerry Darcy: Yeah. I mean, in George Lucas's 60 Minutes interview that he just did, he talked about how he has the luxury to keep changing things until about two weeks before the actual release date, which has thrown us into pandemonium every now and then. But it's been far different from having three movies that you can draw from at any point in time. You know how the story begins, you know how the story ends. It's just been a very different experience.
[04:53] Bill Martinson: You know, there's kind of an interesting side note here. I know some people have questioned why we've done Young Jedi first, instead of doing a larger, more full-featured CCG, and actually your question really leads to the answer to that. Because a full-featured CCG, where you go into every possible detail, where you show timer mines and you have a card for every single thing that happened in the film, could never be done before a film's been released, because you just don't have access to that level of detail yet. And nobody, probably not even George Lucas, knows today exactly what that final film is going to look like. Young Jedi is a product that comes in at a more big-picture level. It does not go into all of those details, although it does have a lot of gameplay detail. Young Jedi is more of a broad-based sampling of what's in the film that gives the whole story arc without that level of detail, and really it's more feasible to do that.
[05:51] Carol Wisely: Well, that's great that you brought that up, because obviously I've had people questioning why you did this, why you did a simpler CCG first, or why you are doing two. And I think, as development people and core gamers, core collectors, and definitely not nine-to-thirteen-year-olds or anywhere near, you can probably give a fairly objective viewpoint on that, to explain that philosophy.
[06:27] Jerry Darcy: Yeah. One of the things that we hear from our customers every now and then is that some of them very much enjoy playing in the classic Star Wars universe, and others want to be playing more of the movie. They want to play the events that occurred in the movie. And I think that Young Jedi leans more towards the players that want to relive and re-experience what occurred during the movie than playing in the broader universe with a variety of characters. This is going to have the main characters and the supporting characters and the key locations, the key events, and it's going to be more representative of the movie than our classic game is, which is more representative of the entirety of the Star Wars universe.
[07:16] Carol Wisely: And that classic universe is so rich now, of course. And yet I guess over the next year or so, the minute the movie is out, the time in the universe that this movie takes place will begin to emerge from all the masses of stuff that's going to be produced.
[07:40] Bill Martinson: Right, yeah, I'm sure it will. I think Jerry's comments about that are really good. Another way to look at the difference between the two games is to say that Young Jedi is a very focused, highly interactive battle game that has the elements of the film, whereas the larger game later on will have those elements and will also have the larger variety of strategies, going into the game at different levels and trying to win in different ways—much like the classic game has a lot of different ways you can win that aren't necessarily based around a big story theme that you saw in the film. Whereas in Young Jedi, everything is basically what you see in the film. It's a battle game, and it's all about the battles that you see in the film. So it's more focused. It's a quicker-paced game than our existing CCGs. It's a game where you can build a deck very quickly, you can play a game very quickly, you can play two or three more games very quickly. So it really just provides a different experience than, say, the classic game has, just in terms of the pace of the game and length of the game, and that trade-off between how much time you invest versus how much strategic detail is there. And I think people will ultimately really enjoy playing actually all three of our Star Wars CCGs that we'll eventually have.
[09:07] Carol Wisely: Oh, I talked to Jerry earlier about the compatibility issue, and I'm going to raise it with you just because it's the most asked question at the moment. I'm pretty sure that everybody out there knows now that Young Jedi is absolutely not compatible with our classic game, and some people are puzzled about why we did that. So I know why we did it. Explain why we did it. What's your point of view on that?
[09:35] Bill Martinson: Well, one way that I try to answer that question is by drawing a contrast with Star Trek. In the Star Trek universe you have time travel and parallel universes and chroniton particles and all these quasi-technical ways of all kinds of bizarre things happening. In the Star Wars universe, by contrast, it's basically: this one goes here, this one goes here. There's no time travel; there are no parallel universes. It's a very orderly universe that's very much like our universe, with the exception that there's the Force and there are the Jedi Knights. But it proceeds in a very orderly fashion, and you just can't have a character who's 30 or 35 years old and the same character who's eight years old in play at the same time on opposite sides of the Force. You just can't have things happening in the game—for example, if Anakin were to die in your game, then how would Darth Vader ever exist in the first place? So you would create so many temporal paradoxes just by merging those cards in the first place that the credibility factor would just be non-existent. It would be difficult for me to play a game like that, where none of the story elements were making any sense at all.
[10:49] Bill Martinson: And then there's also just the gameplay differences. The film is going to have different elements from the three films that we've seen. There will be a different emphasis. The fact that there aren't just one or two Jedi in the whole universe in Episode One makes things feel different. So there really needs to be a different feel; there need to be different game plans. Certainly the stories just can't cross at the same time.
[11:20] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, that's a good point. With Anakin: when you hear Obi-Wan Kenobi talk about Darth Vader in the first movie, he talks about how Vader hunted down and destroyed the last of the Jedi, and we eventually find out about Luke and Leia being Vader's children. So if Anakin got killed in the classic Star Wars card game, there'd be no Empire or Rebellion, because the Jedi wouldn't have been hunted down and destroyed; Luke and Leia wouldn't exist. You'd just have to take your cards, throw them off the table, try something different. It really wouldn't work from a storyline standpoint.
[12:02] Bill Martinson: Right. In a way it would be a bit like trying to play a Vietnam-era board game and a World War II–era board game at the same time, and if in the World War II–era board game Hitler was successful, then the whole Vietnam scenario would never even exist. So there's such a temporal causality effect going on from Episode One through the later episodes that they just can't be happening at the same time. It corrupts both of them.
[12:31] Jerry Darcy: Right, yeah. Your earlier comment, I think, was right on target. It just corrupts both universes.
[12:37] Carol Wisely: And I guess this argument carries through to the development of the core game, the fully featured CCG that you're doing for Episode One as well, right? Well, I'm in absolute agreement with you there, and I want to clear that up for all the people out there. And again I want to re-emphasize: classic still has a long way to go. It's a great game at the moment. We've seen the most tournaments we've ever seen; we've been hitting records week on week. So there's a very vigorous community still playing Star Wars classic out there. And amazingly enough, from the comments I hear, Special Edition is still being explored and brought into the tournament scene. That was a huge set, and I don't think anybody really realized how long it would take to see all of those new game elements and those new twists and permutations get explored. Every week we hear of a new deck archetype, and then we hear of a new strategy. And I know people are saying, where's Endor? But I'm also hearing, yeah, I know Endor's coming, but I haven't finished with Special Edition yet, in terms of learning it.
[13:45] Jerry Darcy: And then there's Death Star beyond that, plus all the other concepts that we're doing. There's lots of stuff to come for classic.
[13:52] Carol Wisely: Well, we're almost out of time now; it's been quite a long interview. I want to touch a little bit on the simplicity element of this game, because you guys keep saying it's much easier to learn but it's challenging to play, and that's fascinating to hear. I love stuff that's easy to learn. I'm still struggling to become a fully fledged CCG player of both our classic and our Star Trek games. So just elucidate a bit: what does that mean, simpler to learn but challenging to play?
[14:25] Bill Martinson: Well, we've tried to create a basic game engine that has a lot of detail in how a battle comes about, that has a lot of surprise factor, a lot of unpredictability, but it's basically a simple mechanic to understand. It takes like five minutes to learn it and you've got it. We've also tried to keep the cards really focused. Everything in the game is really about battle: the cards are about battle, about helping you battle better, about different variety of things you can do in battle. And so the focus is very simple: you're just trying to do one thing; you're just trying to battle your opponent. You're not trying to do 50 different things. And we've tried really hard to make the rulebook very clear and concise. It has a lot of full-color illustrations. It really leads you through the process step by step. The starter decks are designed to play right away, get you going right away, and really take you through the process a step at a time, so you really can learn very quickly.
[15:25] Jerry Darcy: The mechanism, as Bill said, is very easy to learn, but each individual card is going to behave differently. So the depth of the gameplay is derived really out of the cards rather than out of the rules. So the rules are very simple to learn, but the gameplay is going to be diverse, depending on how you build your deck.
[15:56] Bill Martinson: Right. To contrast with our existing games: there aren't a lot of rules that you have to learn about movement or costs of things, or how many of this you can do in a turn or how many of that you can do in a turn. There are just a few simple rules. The turn sequence is very straightforward; it's a shorter turn sequence than what we have in our existing games, but it still has the variety. So most of the decisions that you make and the variety of choices that you have are really card-driven, so there's a low memorization factor. The cards really tell you what they do. The cards are designed to tell you, in a visual way, how they work, and summarize for you what that card does. So you don't have to do a lot of reading while you're playing; you don't have to do a lot of reading to get through the rules. The rules have a lot of examples, and they're broken up into little manageable chunks for each little topic.
[16:51] Carol Wisely: Well, one thing that I hear a lot from young players when I'm out on the road is that, even if they learn the game, they have extreme difficulty building competitive decks in our current classic game. Unless you spend an enormous time studying all the possible combinations and all the possible counters to those combinations, you can devote a lot of time to building a deck and then have it destroyed easily by one archetype. And I think for young players that can sometimes be difficult. Have you done anything to help them in this game?
[17:25] Bill Martinson: Yeah, we have. We have a deck-building system that's built into Young Jedi that uses an element on the cards to help you build your decks. There are just a couple of really simple rules in the rulebook, that you can learn in 30 seconds and you'll remember forever, that help you build decks quickly that are also balanced. So what the system does, really, is both things at the same time. It makes deck building easy for a new player or for a young player, but still allows a lot of flexibility for a more seasoned CCG player who really wants to go in and fine-tune things by the numbers. And at the same time, it makes sure that somebody isn't going to have a broken deck that has 59 copies of one particular card. And I'm really pleased with how it works. This was another element that Warren really brought to the design process. It was one of those things that he proposed, and we were all kind of scratching our heads thinking, that is never going to work, and it turned out to just be this wonderful thing that's simple and elegant. You have to think about it for about four seconds when you first learn it, and then you've got it, and then it's just there and it works, and it's great, and I think people really enjoy it.
[18:39] Bill Martinson: I really think kids will be able to sit down and just build a deck in five minutes and be ready to play, and be able to go change their deck in a few minutes and fine-tune it a little bit and play again. And they won't really be at a competitive disadvantage for being kids, because the game is really designed to have a really good blend of skill and luck, so that a skilled player will win out more often than not over a less skilled player, but everybody can compete and everybody can win some games, because there is just the right blend of chance.
[19:09] Carol Wisely: Well, that sounds great for me, because I'm neither a new nor a young CCG player, but I'm a lazy CCG player. I just don't devote enough time in my life to learn all those combinations and all those tricks. I got caught out in a sealed deck game recently by one of the new weapon-character combination cards from the Enhanced [Premiere] game, because I hadn't done my homework, and halfway through a sealed deck game I'm like, he can't do that! Well, yes he can, just read the text. Oh—I didn't realize. So I lost. So I think that's really reassuring to hear. I think I am going to become the ace Young Jedi player at Decipher. I think we'll have to start a Young Jedi league the minute it's out there.
[19:57] Bill Martinson: Yeah, I have a feeling that we would not be able to stop that if we wanted to. I know there are a lot of people who are really anxious to start playing.
[20:04] Jerry Darcy: Yeah, I think it's a great lunchtime game. It's a game where you can literally, when the noon whistle blows, start building your deck, play three games and still have time to finish your sandwich before you've got to go back to work.
[20:16] Carol Wisely: Yeah, I really like that aspect of it. That's great. Well, I think we've given away way more than we're supposed to, I'm sure. So when Warren hears this, Bill, Jerry and I will be out of the building—but not before we get that raise.
[20:31] Carol Wisely: Well, I'm wrapping up now our second interview with Bill and Jerry. I've managed, over the last couple of weeks, to squeeze a lot of stuff out of them about Young Jedi. So thanks, guys. I know that you're both busy now working on other stuff, and we're getting closer to the date, so thanks for talking with me.