When asked about the trailer on Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast this week, the Atlanta artist referred to the clip as “a parody.” Sharpe, who had not been in on the joke, then asked 21 Savage if he thought his story was good enough to be adapted for the screen. “I feel like it could be,” 21 Savage replied. “One day.” Check out the conversation below around the 01:38:13 mark.
The faux trailer doubled as a music video for 21 Savage’s new song “American Dream,” which is the title track for his first solo LP since 2018’s I Am > I Was. The visual included references to his 2019 arrest by the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as his creative partnership and friendship with producer Metro Boomin (played by Jabari Banks in the teaser).
The clip was directed by Donald and Stephen Glover, Jamal Olori, and Fam Udeorji. Cast members for the fake movie included Natasha Lyonne, comedian Druski, Gail Bean, Chad Lindberg, Victoria Pedretti, and Young Mazino.
A group of Travelport equity holders and lenders have completed their $570 million equity financing investment into the company, a move Travelport said “significantly deleverages” its balance sheet. The investment, announced last month, changes Travelport’s ownership structure as some owners have converted debt to equity, and the current structure now consists of investors including Elliott Investment Management, Davidson Kempner Capital Management, Canyon Partners and Siris Capital. Travelport CEO Greg Webb in a statement said the investment sets up Travelport “for increased speed, agility and innovation in 2024,” with the capability for Travelport to continue investing in its technology platforms.
A group of Travelport equity holders and lenders have completed their $570 million equity financing investment into the company, a move Travelport said “significantly deleverages” its balance sheet. The investment, announced last month, changes Travelport’s ownership structure as some owners have converted debt to equity, and the current structure now consists of investors including Elliott Investment Management, Davidson Kempner Capital Management, Canyon Partners and Siris Capital. Travelport CEO Greg Webb in a statement said the investment sets up Travelport “for increased speed, agility and innovation in 2024,” with the capability for Travelport to continue investing in its technology platforms.
Off-channel booking aggregator Traxo has had a flurry of partnership announcements in recent months, including a new relationship with CWT, integration into Cornerstone Information Systems and becoming a feature for Booking.com’s business platform. Traxo founder and CEO Andres Fabris spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the recent Phocuswright Conference about what is driving partnership growth as well as where Traxo will focus its technology strategy in the coming year. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: Where are you seeing the biggest interest from potential partners?
Andres Fabris: There’s a lot of interest in structured travel data, and we’re seeing interest across the whole travel ecosystem. You saw the announcement with Cornerstone, which is more about the back office and mid-office on the [travel management company] side. We’ve seen interest from CWT, which is essentially referring their clients to the Traxo system.
Duty-of-care providers feel like the blind spots that they have are getting bigger, because almost all of the duty-of-care providers tend to get feeds and data from the TMC and [global distribution system] channels. As those bookings to continue to shift direct, that blind spot gets bigger and bigger.
We see that in the form of partnerships throughout the ecosystem. Expense providers also crave the data to pre-fill out the expense reports. With the duty-of-care providers, the more data they have, the more comprehensive visibility, the better they can do their job. They can keep more people safe because they’re aware of that location.
On the corporate side, which is our main focus, we’re seeing a surge of interest of corporations realizing the same thing. Every time they hear the words [New Distribution Capability], retailing revolution, supplier direct and airline portals, they get concerned about how they’re going to get that visibility in an environment where the traveler is being tempted to book across a variety of different places.
BTN: Are your duty-of-care relationships direct with the providers or via TMCs?
Fabris: It’s direct relationships with them. It’s two different aspects. The way that the duty-of-care providers historically have gotten information about a traveler that booked outside of the platform into their system was that the traveler had to go in and fill out a form manually. Travelers get busy and they forget, and they don’t necessarily want to broadcast that they have just booked something out of policy, so the adoption rate there has historically been maybe 5 percent. The next generation was, instead of entering it by hand, you can forward your confirmation to International SOS or Crisis 24. Behind the scenes, Traxo is powering all of their sites, including the data processing. That’s Generation 2, because it’s easier than manually entering it, so adoption rates are maybe 20 percent, but you’re still missing the other 80 percent.
Now, the reason we have these direct duty-of-care relationships, is we are able to auto-detect all of the bookings for every travel site service point of sale around the world for the entire company in real time, and provide that information to the company. Now the company is saying, “Please send that downstream to our duty-of-care provider,” so now we have direct relationships with those duty-of-care providers and plumbing in place where we can shift data down to them. Even those duty-of-care providers are starting to refer business to Traxo, so in a lot of cases, we have referral relationships. They know if Traxo’s involved, their visibility improves, and the value proposition grows. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.
BTN: What about expense partners?
Fabris: We’ve been powering data processing for Chrome River, Coupa, Abacus, Roadmap, several others. It’s the same value proposition. There, the realizing is, there’s pretty much a one-to-one correlation between a business trip and expense report, and all the raw materials that go into an expense report, all the data elements from the trip, and of course the traveler would prefer not to have to painstakingly enter a folio by hand. It’s much easier if you can forward in a folio. We’re getting closer to either a zero-effort expense report or get rid of the expense report altogether.
BTN: To what extent is airlines’ NDC push driving interest in Traxo?
Fabris: The airlines are just getting started. Just to kind of get folks a peek around the corner off what’s coming, we launched a site, NDC Tracker, where we track the progress and the investments that all the airlines are making. There are 67 airlines that are making NDC investments and have made NDC-related announcements. It is something that is going to continue to create a bit of concern and a little bit of chaos. I don’t see it getting better.
I see a couple of different approaches that different companies are taking. Some are focused on building the best booking tool and user interface, and the theory is, if I build a better mousetrap, that will magically prevent people from going off-platform. We’ve been building better mousetraps for 20 years, and there’s still 50 percent leakage. There’s another set that say it’s not a [user interface/user experience] issue, it’s a content issue, and if only I were able to get all of the content, then that would prevent leakage. The third bucket is the philosophy that I’ll change the behavior of the traveler, use incentives to drive certain behavior. If I use the right incentives, then magically there will no longer be leakage.
Our view is that, for all three, you can get up to a certain point but they are not the answer, because we’ve been trying it as an industry for decades. This data is out there, you ought to know about it, and we can detect it for you seamlessly. Frankly, we don’t care what you do with it. Most of our clients use it to drive compliance and get people back on the platform. A third or our clients go the opposite direction, especially the professional services firms that are in a war for talent. If they give their road warriors a little extra flexibility, maybe that’s an extra retention tool. There’s no easy answer, but if companies don’t do anything, the blind spots are going to get bigger and bigger.
BTN: In terms of direct corporate business, will large companies still be the focus, or is there an opportunity with small and midsized clients?
Fabris: Historically, we’ve had a small but mighty team, so we aim those limited resources at the large accounts, where we can make the biggest influence. That has been our direct focus. We have relationships with TMCs that are reseller relationships to go after the top of the pyramid. midmarket, we have 20 to 25 referral partnerships, so it’s a little more fragmented. We can be the service provider behind the scenes. At the bottom of the pyramid, the SMEs or unmanaged programs, we now have a new self-service capability. We announced a relationship with Booking.com for Business.
The nature of that is, we have now built a self-service version of Traxo. It is live and deployed on Booking.com for Business. It’s already live for the U.S. and administrators who have identified English as their primary language. Now, we have an ability to help SMEs as well. I don’t want to necessarily go out and find them individually, so we’re interested in partnering with companies that already have an army of SMEs. That same capability we’re offering can be offered to banks. A lot of banks are making moves into travel and have a lot of credit card holders and account holders who tend to be SMEs.
BTN: What’s your focus for technology development? Is it all about artificial intelligence?
Fabris: We already incorporate some AI, machine learning, natural language processing in our data processing. You’ll see us focus much more on getting from data to insights. We have all the data across every point of sale in the world. The next step is, what are you going to do with it? Do you need to go out and negotiate better rates? Do you need to crack the whip on compliance? Do you need to get more dynamic hotel pricing? That’s going to come through a series of visualization tools. We want to add the ability for someone to speak to the application, prompt it, maybe a bar like you can see on ChatGPT and it understands the query.
We’re also creating the ability to deliver a Monday morning report. You set it up, and instead of you coming and getting it from us, it just gets deposited right in your inbox. We’re also doing the ability to bulk upload. Let’s say you have a big corporate event and a rooming list. You can also get that into the system as well. Today, that does not come necessarily via confirmations.
The last place, where we’re spending a lot of time and energy, is establishing more connections, connectors that are already pre-built, so the menu where Traxo can move data to gets broader and broader.
May December brought to life the story of Gracie (Julianne Moore) and her relationship with Joe (Charles Melton) years after she manipulated him as a child (the film is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal). The screenplay, written by Samy Burch, is a mix of humor and satire that lures us into Joe and Gracie’s world as they invite Hollywood actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) into their home to research her role as Gracie in an upcoming movie.
I spoke with Burch about working with director Todd Haynes and crafting a story that ultimately puts Joe front and center in the audience’s heart through the story. In talking with Burch, we discussed how she used Gracie and Elizabeth to highlight how Gracie’s actions stunted Joe’s growth as a man.
“I think that even from the first description, I think the first time you see him described in the script, it’s despondent or that there’s just a look in his eye,” she said. “There’s something so repressed and thoughtful and as you say, quiet, that Charles Melton brings so beautifully. His performance just breaks my heart. That was really always the intention that we get a certain sense of this character. And certainly he has his roles to play in this family and in this dynamic. As we go along, at a certain point, we get all these little quiet private moments. He’s very protected within the structure. And then at a certain point he kind of steps into the light as the focus, and as the heart, I think.”
A fading image of Gracie
When we meet Gracie, she seems like a beloved pillar of her community surrounded by loyal friends. The movie then slowly peels those layers away and we learn the truth about her. Gracie’s reveal is a slow burn for audiences and the film’s characters alike.
“I write from an outline,” Burch said. “So, that’s a part of it is certainly I’m not writing not knowing where it’s going. And I also in general, at least for the majority of the first draft, and then, things get played with, right? Chronologically. So there is that calibration as you go. But I think there’s just a lot of tension inherently with these characters that Todd, being the master filmmaker that he is, and these incredible actors, enhance. But so much tension comes from what’s not being said. There’s a lot of delusion, there’s a lot of denial. Some of it incredibly dangerous or dysfunctional. Some of it is more what everyone has a certain level of performance, I think going about their life. So, kind of, being aware of that tension of the gap between what’s being said and what, I feel as a writer, what I think we feel as an audience member, I think that has a lot to do with making sure that there’s some sort of escalation or what the arcs are emotionally.”
Bringing the actor’s truth to life
(L-R: Samy Burch, Todd Haynes, and Charles Melton. image: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
As someone who studied Meisner acting techniques in school, I was fascinated by Portman’s Elizabeth. I also thought it was hilarious that this actress, who was so completely unserious, was taking her research to such an extreme level. For Burch, she clearly felt similarly about Elizabeth as a character.
“I think that there’s something inherently comedic really about a TV actress from a network,” Burch said. “She’s got something to prove and that’s her having this kind of experience is ultimately more important to her than anything else. And I think the fun of the movie is getting to slowly lose our trust in this person, even though right off the bat she’s very insincere with everybody. We can tell in their first interaction. Natalie is so funny in this movie. The way that she interacts, even on these very easy levels that most people probably don’t have to pretend to say, ‘nice to meet you’ or can sense that Elizabeth is working very hard for that.”
Burch went on to talk about how Portman’s work brings out the performance aspect of Elizabeth’s life. “I’ve known a lot of actors in my life [Burch worked as a casting director previously.] This isn’t reflected on them, but there’s a performative nature obviously that’s enhanced with those kinds of people. And this is an extreme version of one, but yes, it would, she’s a very fun character to write and get to know because there are those moments where you see the mask fall and those are very compelling.”
Building to a horrifying confrontation
One of the most horrifying parts of May December comes from Gracie talking about “who” is in charge in her relationship. She talks about how Joe (who was a child when their relationship began) seduced her. At the end of the film, they have an explosive fight where she claims to be innocent and powerless during a time when she very much wasn’t.
“It was always gonna build to some kind of confrontation that was never going to be satisfying for Joe,” Burch said. “I think because, in one way, Gracie is unknowable. The whole movie sort of orbits around that, of how aware she was at the time and currently is and how much is an act and how much is manipulation, how much is something else. So I think that’s very complicated and not easy to unravel. But then there’s also a real willfulness both in, we see it in other ways in the film, but she refuses to look at herself. So even if her transgression wasn’t as extreme as this, I think the fact that he was trying to talk to her and that wall is so firmly up, that was never, it would never end. It would never end with her going, ‘oh, I see your point.’”
She went on to talk about how the fight continued to be a downfall for Joe. “So that always felt like where the climax of, at least, the two of them would go towards. I think a lot of the film is Joe just at the very beginning, just the very first part of these plates shifting within him and his perception. It’s clear why it would take so long and would be so incredibly difficult because of all these things that are on top of him and his situation and for how long. So I think that wall that he hits, it’s almost more effective for him and for us as the audience, cause he’s not being manipulated in that moment. I think it’s stunning. I think he slams into the wall and is actually jolted a bit, which is positive for his character.”
Broadening Sabre’s focus beyond North America and corporate
New APIs for hotel merchandizing
Efforts on standardizing sustainability data
Sabre called lodging and ground distribution a “significant focus and expected growth area” for the travel technology company when it announced a new leader for the division in recent weeks. Chinmai Sharma, a hospitality technology and revenue management veteran who now is Sabre Travel Solutions’ global head of lodging, ground and sea, spoke with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker during the recent Phocuswright Conference about Sabre’s plans for the segment and how technology is evolving with the distribution needs of both suppliers and travel agencies. An edited transcript follows.
BTN: What will you be focusing on in your new role?
Chinmai Sharma: Hotels in particular is an interesting area. We are very heavily concentrated in North America and corporate, and we want to expand that to leisure travel agencies, midsize and long-tail agencies as well as international. Part of my strategy is to make the program a little bit better. That includes for the travel agent community, we want to be sure we have good compelling content.
We have nearly a million hotels already on the platform, and we continuously evaluate more partners to bring on the platform, so it becomes more relevant to the travel agency partners. We’re also developing a strategy where, for whatever reason, if we don’t have the right content, we will work with aggregator partners and online travel agencies to bring that unique content in. If there is a requirement in the travel agency community to book certain types of products, we should just have it.
The broader aim is to stay relevant in the travel space. In lodging, we already have a dominant share. Globally, a lot of business we do for hotels on the [global distribution system] channel we have the biggest shares, but a lot of that comes from the heavy North American presence of large hotel chains and [travel management companies]. The vision of the leadership team at Sabre is there is room for improvement in lodging, ground and sea, and we add a lot of value to our supply partners, because the quality of customers that we bring is very good. They pay high rates, they spend on property, etc.
We are also loyalty-friendly, so the hotels see us a little differently compared to some of the other channels. We are developing our ecosystem in such a way that we want to transfer as much information as the agencies want us to transfer to the hotels so the end traveler has the better experience. That could include communication details, loyalty numbers, loyalty status, preferences, etc. So, if you’re booking through a corporate travel agency or leisure travel agency, the end experience is really good. That’s the focus. Bring really good content and supply to the platform and develop Sabre as a solidly B-to-B technology platform, which adds volume to our travel agency community and our suppliers.
BTN: Is there an effort equivalent to what’s happening with New Distribution Capability on the lodging side in how lodging content is presented?
Sharma: Everybody is focused on what they call brand-direct efforts. We differentiate ourselves from the other channels since we pass on as much information as we can. We are on the right side of the loyalty program because we add more value there. The NDC battle in the hotel industry is what we call attribute-based selling. It’s essentially how can you break up the products at the hotel level so you can sell them individually. Hotels are real estate, basically, and you want to maximize that.
There is a big focus within Sabre at Sabre Hospitality on retailing and merchandizing, and they’re developing a product called Retail Studio, which is helping hotels to do that. If you bring that same logic over to the Sabre side, we want to make that easier for the travel agencies to do that as well. We are coming up with some new APIs for the first time where things like interconnecting rooms and booking multiple rooms will become easier. That will appeal to the leisure travel agencies as well.
If the hotels have inventory they want to provide, we would love to pass that on the travel agency community. The next couple of years, there will be some announcements to very easily aggregate restaurant reservation, banquet booking capabilities, group capabilities, etc. Our whole plan is to just build services for lodging as flexibly and in as modular a way as possible, so whatever the supply partners want to give us to pass on to the agency side and whatever the agency wants to book, we want to become a marketplace. Our dynamics with hotel partners are a little different than NDC and the airlines, and we’re a little bit ahead on working on those concepts.
Content services for lodging is built in a very modular and flexible way, and we are opening up almost like a marketplace to partners who can work with our specifications. That makes it a lot easier for this ecosystem to work.”
BTN: As you build these, will the technology largely be built internally, or will you be looking for external partners?
Sharma: It’s a combination. We’re taking a very pragmatic approach, because any large company like ours has its own momentum. We have our product roadmap built, but we are working very actively with like-minded companies because we can only do so much in a certain amount of time, and if there is a market need, then we are flexible to partner with companies that can integrate into our solutions. The good thing is, content services for lodging is built in a very modular and flexible way, and we are opening up almost like a marketplace to partners who can work with our specifications and be available in that marketplace. That makes it a lot easier for this ecosystem to work, so that it doesn’t completely depend only on our speed and adding solutions. We can make it a little broader.
BTN: As you seek to broaden your footprint, are any particular geographies first on your agenda?
Sharma: We’re already a very global company, but we’re very heavily penetrated and mature in the North American market. All the growing markets are of interest to us. The natural areas where we’ll focus first is Europe, because that’s relatively well-developed and has a very synergistic effect with North America because of the travel corridors. We’re generating a lot of interest in Latin America and Asia-Pacific as well. We will follow wherever the travel agency community wants us to, because that’s our primary customer. Everything we do is for the managed travel category, and wherever they have needs, we will continue to solve them.
Even though there is a big focus on lodging, we are simultaneously working on ground services and car rentals and rail as well. We recently announced a partnership with Trainline to get new content for our partners, and it’s very relevant for the European market. It’s also very environmentally friendly. Probably all customers are becoming more conscious, but especially in Europe, rail is a part of life, so we do want to expand our services so we eventually have that complete trip in mind.
Whatever confidence you need to make the complete trip or the travel agency work, we will continue to add those. Over a period of time, this could include mobility, ground transportation, airport pickup, restaurant reservation, etc. We will be driven by the travel advisors. Whatever they want us to build, we are a tech platform that can make it happen.
BTN: Are multimodal comparisons a priority?
Sharma: Yes, because Sabre luckily has all the travel companies already in the system, and we want to expose the best possible fare options and choices to the travel advisors. Sometimes, the limitations or the specifications come from the travel agencies because they want to see results in a certain way. Where we have the flexibility to give them more possibilities, we’re already doing it. Sabre has a proprietary tool called [Sabre Red] 360, which is the agent point of sale, and that’s where we’re doing a lot of innovation, of normalizing the content so we can serve it in a bite-sized way.
We have a long-standing relationship with Google, so we’re developing some new products broadly under the travel AI category. Specifically for lodging, we have a solution called Lodging AI, which does very simple things for the travel agency community but is very intuitive. If they are booking a hotel that is not available, how do you recommend them hotels that make sense? If you forgot to attach a hotel in an airline booking, how do you make that recommendation in a very intuitive way?
The demographic of the advisory community is also changing, so a lot of younger advisors are coming on board. They don’t like the command prompts anymore. They like a graphic user stream. The content needs to be consumer-grade, so we’re spending a lot of time and effort making sure we get all the visual content the right way and we surface it the right way to the consumers, because it has to be nearly the same B-to-C grade in the new world we have. If there are 35,000 options available, how do you show 25 relevant options?
BTN: What are the challenges you see specific to rail content?
Sharma: Our strategy is that at least with the key rail suppliers, we want to have direct relationships and direct APIs. So, with partners like Amtrak and [France’s] SNCF we have our own connectivity. In markets where we can bring that content faster, we will partner with those partners like Trainline. Our approach is that we want to look at all our travel competence and how we can add value. If you just look at rail or car rental alone, then it doesn’t look that significant. It’s almost like table stakes for that company to have it. We will always stay invested in making sure that any requirements the travel agency community have, we are able to add value and solve that. Rail in particular is a little more challenging because it’s more fragmented and there are reasonable answers, but at least right now we are solving a big part of that. Just like we had an integration with Trainline, we continually look at partners that can bring in new content and solve problems for the advisors.
BTN: What about sustainability data for hotel and ground?
Sharma: It’s becoming increasingly important. It’s becoming a major factor in how the rates are being procured and the RFP process, because corporations are becoming more sensitive to approving suppliers who are eco-friendly. Our role as a travel platform is to make sure whatever content we service for the advisor community should have the right labels and right logos. We are working very actively to see how best we can service travel options that are more eco-friendly.
Our focus on rail and Trainline is very similar, because some of the countries in Europe are moving in the direction where they might mandate travel within two hours be done on rail, and a lot of hotel companies are very focused on the eco-friendly aspect as well. Our challenge, and opportunity, is that we have more than a million hotels on the platform, and we need to standardize how we service that through the travel community, so it’s not apples and oranges. If it’s a LEED-certified hotel, how do we display it on the search result and give it a little bit of a bias so the agency community can select it. We are developing our content APIs in such a way that any information on certification or being eco-friendly is able to be displayed on the end screen, and that’s a role we have to play, and that’s how we will make it more available in the ecosystem.
A few months ago, Team Reptile finally releasedBomb Rush Cyberfunk on consoles and PC platforms. Many consider it a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio, and it does a lot to look and feel amazing and fresh throughout. I’ve played it on multiple platforms, and it is a superb experience for portables that shines on the Steam Deck. While Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was a digital release at launch, it screamed for a good physical edition. That finally happened with iam8bit and Skybound Games. Following that launch, I got to chat with Team Reptile’s Dion Koster about his career, the game, music, his dancing, the future, and more.
TouchArcade (TA): For those unaware, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Team Reptile.
Dion Koster (DK): Hello, I am Dion Koster, game director and co-founder of Team Reptile. I’m hands-on with many facets like character design and modeling, gameplay design and programming and writing the story. For the rest, I provide direction to the team and pick the music for the soundtrack and such.
TA: How has the Dion Koster who worked on Awesomenauts back in 2012 changed from the one who directed Bomb Rush Cyberfunk?
DK: Now that is a question I did not expect! It’s true, I worked on Awesomenauts as a game design intern. Although it was in mid-development in 2009, before Team Reptile started in 2011. The best way to describe it is that at that time I kept my personal style and life mostly separated from work, it only subconsciously seeped in. From a young age, I have been dancing, skating and writing graffiti, over the years it became a theme in my work before finally becoming the subject with Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.
TA: As Game Director, what was your core philosophy during the project’s development?
DK: Formulated into an interview answer there is not enough room for nuance, but I strongly believe we should make things that are loudly personal. The uncomfortability of loudness only needs to be limited by the point of frustration. As long as it then actually comes from life and self expression it will have a high impact.
TA: While the aesthetic and graffiti art is all amazing, the one area I want to highlight is the user interface. This is one area a lot of games falter on, but Bomb Rush Cyberfunk absolutely nails it. Tell us a little bit about how the interface evolved over the course of the game’s development.
DK: Thank you for the kind words! Sem Graham is an amazing artist who does the graphic design. Think billboards, props, all the mascots. He had designed a preliminary version of the UI, but well, it turned out too ‘videogamey’. Looking at the first illustrations I did of the game, I remembered my obsession with fluid dynamics. These marbling patterns took the style away from simply retro and added a dreamy, brain fluid-like layer that spoke of the themes in the story. Realizing this I had Sem and programmer Niels Vriezen make it a recurring motif throughout the game.
TA: I’ve seen clips of your dancing used in-game. Was that mo-capped during development?
DK: That is correct. I just danced on my own when I was young, but started getting into it around the end of 2003. So by now, I have been dancing for 20 years. It is breaking and locking that I do most and basically my whole circle is involved in street culture. Downstairs in our Team Reptile office ‘De Bass’ there’s a studio where there are dance sessions every week and we do some recording. Everybody is happy to provide mocap of course and I had to jump in myself too.
TA: While obviously these are important for all games, I feel like art, music, and gameplay feel even more important for a game like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. How did you approach curating the soundtrack for the game?
DK: I wanted the music to have some technologic or cyber elements mixed with funk or hard beats and preferably really danceable. So I let my dance ear guide me a lot. Only some tracks were made specifically for the game, most of them were already out there. Which is another thing I went for, music that says something more than just ‘this is a videogame’. It has its own voice. People often came to me with music inspired by the game and I had to reject them sadly. Because then the layer of extra meaning is removed and the whole thing is flat.
TA: Obviously the game is in an amazing place right now, but do you want to do more with it?
DK: Before Bomb Rush Cyberfunk we made Lethal League and Lethal League Blaze. Both these titles were online and competitive. Of course, this required a lot of attention constantly. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk stands in stark contrast being a singleplayer game with an ending – a rarer thing these days. I believe that its story has been concluded and there is no artistic reason to reanimate it. There are many more experiences to be expressed, but they would shine only in a completely new game.
TA: How have you felt about the response and feedback from players and the media?
DK: I am very happy to receive so much positive feedback. But there is one thing that goes above and beyond. It is when people tell me they have picked up skating, dancing or going out because of the game.
DK: I think we presumed it, but when you are working hard to finish a game, it is sometimes difficult to step back and actually make moves to get it sorted.
TA: How did you decide what to include in the physical release and in the vinyl soundtrack?
DK: Adding stickers was one of the quickest decisions to make. It just fits in line with the idea of the game. I felt like the graffiti booklet in the iam8bit Exclusive Edition was also really good to show that there are voices behind all the styles we are featuring. They stand on their own too, you know. And the vinyl, of course vinyls are actually represented in the game. Both in and outside the game I wanted the records to look like proper club-spun records. Fun fact: on the cover is a photo of a big fungus we found.
TA: Digital Foundry mentioned great keyboard and mouse controls in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (on Steam). This isn’t a game I’d expect to have good keyboard and mouse support at all, so I wanted to know how much work went into optimizing it for multiple control options.
DK: In the early days of Team Reptile it was way easier to release on PC than consoles, even though we liked making action arcade-like experiences. So we became used to dealing with keyboard and mouse for our type of games. Still, during healthy development the input layout switches around so we had a bunch of that too. My decision to remove all important actions from the face buttons on gamepads and replace them all with just tricks and jumping was a big one. Same for the mouse buttons. But it worked cause even if they weren’t the most important, it is the stuff you are doing most of the time.
TA: What were your major gaming influences for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk outside of the obvious Jet Set Radio.
DK: Honestly I could fill the page with influences outside of gaming! But if you are going to limit it like that… I looked a lot at the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, SSX and many other trick games. Grand Theft Auto too. If I stretch the definition, I can mention the graffiti minigame is inspired by a phone unlock screen. Story-wise, Ghost Trick is the greatest of all time, it might not be apparent, but I think it has influenced my work too.
TA: What have you been playing this year?
DK: I feel like there have been a lot of mid releases this year for me personally. I have more so been enjoying myself watching my girlfriend do interior design in Sims 4.
TA: What’s next for Team Reptile after the physical launch of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk?
DK: We are already creating the next game to be honest! Making Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was really fun so we are doing more in the same vein. Leveled up and wilder. At this moment it is mostly pre-production. There are so many things to show and stories to tell when it comes to the meeting of futurism and street culture, I am excited!
I’d like to thank Dion Koster from Team Reptile and Jordan Boyd from fortyseven communications for their time and help with this interview.
May December crafts a wildly uneasy and twisted look at ambitious actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) as she aims to tell the story of married couple Grace (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton). The more we learn about their story, the more we see how many people have been hurt by Grace’s actions. One casualty of her “love story” with Joe is her son Georgie (Gotham‘s Cory Michael Smith), who was a childhood friend of Joe.
Georgie and Joe were both 13 at the time of Grace’s affair with Joe (Grace was in her 30s) and Georgie still struggles with the aftermath of their affair and the implosion of his family. Though he isn’t on screen for very long, Georgie is one of the more fascinating characters to unpack in Todd Haynes’ deeply unsettling film. In talking with Smith, you can tell just how much love and care he put into his character, who is broken and stunted by Grace much in the same way that Joe has been. But Georgie hasn’t had the spotlight shined on him in the same way.
We talked about a great many things when it came to Georgie. From his first introduction (because … come on, Georgie singing in a bar in town is kind of iconic) to the feelings between Georgie and Joe. I wanted to know how the experience of making the film fed into Smith’s performance.
When both sides of Gracie’s family run into each other at a graduation dinner, the tension is almost unbearably high. You can see just how giddy Georgie is at the idea of this awkward energy eating everyone alive around him. I asked Cory Michael Smith about that scene in particular and crafting Georgie’s performance in that moment. While Georgie is far from the most important character in the scene, he remains incredibly arresting.
“I mean, it is just the most awkward thing,” he said. “And I just think that Georgie, I wanted him to feel the awkwardness of this and sort of like, ‘I do not want this to be happening, but also sort of like, this is awesome.’ Walking into that scene, I always kind of wanted him to look like you don’t know whether he is stifling a laugh or actually just in immense dread because it’s the most awkward.”
Last month, SEGA and Sports Interactive released Football Manager 2024 on Apple Arcade (Touch), Netflix (Mobile), consoles, PC, and even Game Pass. If you missed my detailed review covering many versions of the game, read it here. Following the launch, I had a chance to talk to Sports Interactive about features on different platforms, working with Apple Arcade, cross save, Switch physical releases, and a lot more. The focus will be Football Manager 2024 Touch, and I spoke to Producer Neil Harper and PR & Content Executive Andrew Sinclair from the team here.
TouchArcade (TA): This year, Football Manager 2024 ships on more platforms than ever before. How do you decide what features to prioritize adding into each platform when development begins?
Neil Harper (NH): Speaking from my experience in the Touch and Console teams, we consider a number of factors when deciding which features to introduce in a given year. These include the vision of our Design team, player habits & analytics data, player sentiment and feedback from both our QA teams and Studio Director Miles Jacobson. We also consider the work that the PC team have committed to and then look to tailor some of their additions to ensure they fit the various Touch and Console platforms from both a gameplay and practical functionality perspective.
TA: Football Manager 2024 Touch’s standout feature from the get go is the interface optimized for iPhone screens. This year, it feels like a proper game tailored for iPhone as well as iPad rather than being a tablet game ported down. How much work went into the iPhone side of things here?
NH: We reviewed feedback from Football Manager 2023 Touch and understood the frustrations of some users with the size of the menu options available.
We were keen to make the iPhone version of the title as accessible as possible and therefore a lot of time was spent to ensure that this was an improvement on last year’s version while also ensuring the best iPhone experience with both touch and controller input.
As a team we always try to remain agile and responsive, so we’re already looking at the feedback on this year’s changes and discussing how we can drive further improvements to the interface in the future.
TA: Has there been any additional work for iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max?
NH: When we are developing new features for our Touch games, we always consider how this will look and function on an iPhone.
This means both older models and the latest and greatest. With the newer models of iPhone, for example, we have to consider and cater for the Dynamic Island and ensure that there’s enough space within our user interface.
TA: If we go for a reductive way of differentiating the versions of Football Manager 2024, you have PC followed by Console followed by Touch and then Mobile with features and complexity reducing in that order. Do you think we will reach a point where you have one version of the game on all platforms with just the interface changing?
Andrew Sinclair (AS): We have done a lot of user research over the years and we understand that each of our four titles all serve very different audiences with differing needs and playing personas.
So, our priority as a studio is ensuring that we continue to serve all of those people by ensuring that each edition of Football Manager is optimized to be the best version possible for that format and audience.
TA: What is your favorite feature in Football Manager 2024 Touch that makes it stand out compared to the last few years for those who haven’t played the game in a while.
NH: That’s a tough question and not an easy one to answer!
I’d probably say the new Dynamics feature. This has been present in the PC version of Football Manager for a few years but we’ve introduced it to FM24 Touch in a wholly different way.
Being able to set your own principles from the first day you take a job is a unique touch and the feature is wholly immersive, with your actions throughout the seasons being reflected in how your players buy-in to your vision and ultimately how they perform in training and on Matchdays.
TA: How has it been working with Apple and the Apple Arcade team for two years in a row now on the game.
NH: Working with Apple for the past two years has been an incredible opportunity. Both the Production and Marketing teams at Apple Arcade strive to ensure that the best game possible is released on their platform and are always receptive to our features and plans for the Football Manager Touch series.
The relationship between our team and theirs has gone from strength to strength since we first began on this venture.
TA: Are there plans to ever offer Switch and Apple Arcade save syncing since both are the same Touch version?
NH: Not at this time.
TA: Are there any plans to do a physical release on Switch?
AS: We have released a physical version of our Switch title in the past and we’re doing so once again with Football Manager 2024 Touch. This is only going live in selected Asian territories though, with some launching in early December and then Japan’s launch following in January 2024.
TA: What are the challenges at Sports Interactive for the developers working on multiple versions on a yearly franchise?
AS: It’s a big undertaking, certainly, but as we have specialized, dedicated teams working on each of these titles it’s actually more streamlined than you might anticipate from a development point of view.
There is a challenge for our Marketing team because they have to ensure that their strategy effectively communicates the new features and key information about all four editions. Our Customer Support team has to be agile too in understanding the complexities of each version across various devices in order to adequately support players who might have encountered bugs or are having technical issues.
The key for both of them though is constant communication internally with the relevant platform teams throughout the year, meaning that they know the feature set early and have access to builds and production updates.
TA: Is there a dedicated team working on each version or are there shared staff members?
AS: We have dedicated teams for all four versions of FM that we release on a yearly basis – FM, Touch, Console and Mobile. These teams include dedicated Quality Assurance Testers as well as producers and designers focused on delivering the best product possible on their specific platforms.
Some teams across the studio, such as our Research group, work with each of these individual platform teams throughout the year.
TA: How do you balance game features in Apple Arcade where there are no microtransactions while the console versions have those?
NH: We do have a number of in-app purchases available in Football Manager 2024 Console but these are designed to be fun extras without being essential to progressing in a save.
With FM23 Touch, we ran a series of events that offered players one-time use items such as a Dream Transfer that they could utilize within their saves. Look out for these once again with FM24 Touch.
TA: Are there plans to bring the in-game editor or pre-game editor to Apple Arcade in the future?
NH: Not at this time.
TA: So the game has controller support, but does it also have full keyboard mouse support on iPad?
NH: Yes, there is full keyboard and mouse support for people playing FM24 Touch on iPads.
TA: What would you like to add to FM Touch that you couldn’t add this year?
AS: While we would always love to add even more to each of our releases, we’re proud of the feature set in Football Manager 2024 Touch. From our perspective we feel that we have introduced things that will impact and improve everyone’s saved games, whether that’s carrying forward your career from FM23 Touch or setting up your new manager principles, and the feedback we’ve had so far from our players backs that up.
I’d like to thank Sports Interactive’s Producer Neil Harper and PR & Content Executive Andrew Sinclair and also Jennifer Tam from Apple for their time here.
The National’s Matt Berninger sat down with longtime fan David Letterman for an intimate discussion about depression, Berninger’s songwriting process, and the demands of maintaining a balanced life as a public figure. The two men chatted in a cozy house in the country, where they made their own cake pops by dipping tiny cake spheres into mugs of colorful chocolate. Watch it all happen below.
During their half-hour conversation, Letterman asked Berninger about his experience with depression and relayed his own difficulties with it over the years. Berninger mentioned a tough period that occurred roughly a year into the pandemic, and how his mental state prevented him from writing, even as his bandmates were sending him music.
At one point, Berninger revealed that some of his difficulties stemmed from the gap between being a public, performing artist and navigating the more mundane side of life. He spoke of the dissonance between “having to kind of turn on a personality for an intense few hours, and then turn it off, and then try to get some sleep and then the next day, turn it on, turn it off.” Letterman related to the feeling and referred to that mental back-and-forth during his time on late-night television as “holy hell.”
Letterman also asked Berninger about his writing process for Laugh Track songs like “Space Invader,” “Hornets,” and “Smoke Detector,” particularly the “Smoke Detector” line about “pharmacy slippers.” Berninger said that the lyric was a reference to getting on medication for his depression, and standing in line under the harsh fluorescent lights at Rite-Aid. Letterman said he had pictured a Duane Reade.
The National released Laugh Track in September, marking their second album of 2023, following First Two Pages of Frankenstein.
BERLIN—Bayer Chief Executive Bill Anderson said the company would bounce back quickly from a recent spate of bad news, and warned that a breakup of the pharmaceutical and agricultural company was no universal cure for its ailments.
A stream of negative news has rekindled calls from investors for Bayer to unlock value by spinning off its units into separate businesses. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, Anderson said the company couldn’t be distracted from the tough restructuring to fix the businesses.
What made you want to revive this particular song for the cause?
It’s sort of a long story because I wrote it between Homogenic and Vespertine and it was just too poppy. It just didn’t fit into either of those albums. I just put it on salt. I programmed the original beat, and I guess I was sort of going for some sort of a dancehall mood. When I was listening to the track, I was like, Hmm, Rosalía, her last album was sort of experimental reggaeton. I can really imagine her voice inside this. Maybe that’s a better way to get a guest vocalist, who sort of represents now, and there’s this tunnel into the past, us having this kind of conversation.
I’ve known her for a few years, so I just texted her, and she immediately said yes, before even having heard the song. I think she was also wanting to support the cause. I told her about the fish farming, and we’ve been chatting about it. We translated the press release into Spanish, because it’s a huge problem in Argentina and Chile. I’m hoping it will somehow encourage people in all these other countries to do something.
The way you said when we win makes me think of the line in the song, “The dream and the real, get them acquainted”—you weren’t necessarily thinking of applying that to environmental causes when you wrote it so many years ago. How does that idea fit into your advocacy angle for the song’s release?
You’re right, obviously, I was not thinking about salmon then. There are other songs, for example—“Declare Independence,” I wrote for the Faroe Islands and Greenland. I wanted to challenge this kind idea of what a protest song is. So I was like, “Let’s do a punk rave song that is a protest song.”
But this song is not like that at all. I like the fact that it’s happy. We are focusing on the solutions, to give people a voice. If we get more money than ust for this court case, we are also going to go into all the legislation, and more into the infrastructure of Iceland’s legal system [about] how we can have strict regulations here. We also understand that this is not a sprint, this is like a marathon. This might take five years, so who knows? One of the reasons why I picked this case is because it is still possible to stop the mutant Norwegian salmon. It is still possible to get our fjords back.
As someone who loves indie comics, I’ve been following Lawrence Lindell’s comics for a while. So I was especially excited to see their first published graphic novel Blackward hit shelves a month ago. As long as we’ve had comics, we’ve had Black cartoonists making them, but mainstream comics publishing is just barely starting to catch up in terms of Black stories.
Lindell’s been self-publishing his own comics since 2017, showcasing intersections of mental health, adolescence, queerness, punk, and Blackness (among other topics) with a signature style straight out of 90’s animation. Now a contributor for The New Yorker and putting out work as family publisher Laneha House, Lawrence is unquestionably a prolific voice in the comics world. His newest book Blackward, published by Drawn & Quarterly, follows four queer Black friends aiming to start their own zine fair for all the Black queer punks who never quite felt they fit in elsewhere.
I had the privilege of chatting with Lawrence over Zoom about their new book, how people talk about self-published comics, and why Black queer stories like this should be able to stand on their own.
(Drawn & Quarterly)
TMS: The first thing that strikes me about Blackward, other than how much amazing cartooning there is, is your characters and how they feel like queer friends in my life. They mess with each other, they flirt, they even treat each other to date night! I’d love to hear more about what drew you to your characters of Lika, Tony, Amor, and Lala, why these four?
Lindell: Originally it was just the three, Lika, Amor, and Tony, and then Lala was added. It started as a webcomic, but Lala was added as a featured [character], and she soon became my favorite to draw. People that were reading the comic were like, “We want to see more Lala”. Which had me like, hmm, it should be a group of four.
And yeah, they’re based on my real life experiences, based on real people in my life. I hope that people will read it and be like, “Oh these could be real people.” Yeah, because they are real people. I was afraid if they would get the humor of them messing with each other. Because sometimes the comic is read and people are like, ‘Why are they always yelling?’
You’ve got a huge presence in the indie comics space between your own self-published work and runningLaneha House with your partner Breena Nuñez. You’re also raising a kid, and you’re putting out full graphic novels on top of all that.
That is to say: how are you doing? And what was your workflow like in putting this graphic novel together compared to your other projects?
I’m doing alright. You know, the world is… Yeah.
Anyways, it’s different because of how many people I’m working with, people I’m communicating with. People are saying it’s my debut, but it’s just my debut graphic novel with Drawn & Quarterly.
One of Lindell’s many self-published books (Lawrence Lindell)
The first two books I have coming out, I worked on at the same time, which wasn’t the greatest idea, but I had to do it anyway! And also our kid was just born, so it’s a weird space to navigate where I gotta go to work but we have a newborn. I’m working from home, so that means I should be able to help more but wait, no, I’m in the office because I’m actually working. Just because I’m at home doesn’t change that.
Everyone was saying, ‘Ooh, don’t do that!’ And yeah, I get it, I agree, don’t work on two books at once. But also, we needed the money, and I’ll just do what I gotta do.
That’s an interesting thing you said about people seeing this as your debut, is that something that you’ve gotten a lot as the book was coming out? Ignoring all the other work you’ve done and seeing this as your first comic project?
Yeah, it’s weird, cause I hear, “That’s your first book?” I think that’s weird how we do that in comics. Folks could be making comics for 20+ years, but until the publisher’s somebody, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve arrived.’ But no, they’ve been here.
It’s funny, cause once you get published, then everyone goes back and looks at the earlier work, and then all of a sudden, that earlier work is seen as the good stuff and this is weird.
I love what you saidin a Broken Frontier preview for Blackward, you mentioned that “everything has a purpose and intention”. Now that the book’s out, can you talk about some of your favorite pages/panels you worked on?
You talked about the date night, that’s one of my favorite sequences. It was manga and anime-influenced, and it was always like that when I was penciling and sketching it. There’s some things, like where Lika says it’s time for Code D, there’s four panels, and then on the third panel is when they first transition into the manga style. Which, I don’t know if anyone will care, there’s things in the book where I don’t know if they care, but for me, it’s good.
(Drawn & Quarterly)
And then from that point on, it’s drawn in a loose manga style. And then, by the time they finished the transition scene, they transition back into my cartoon-y stuff. That was something I was proud of.
There’s this impulse I’ve seen from in your other interviews about Blackward to see so many depictions of Black queerness, Black joy, Black experience and assume that there’s a deliberate political statement behind it, something I think a lot of marginalized creators struggle with. Do you see yourself that way when you’re working on your comics, what’s your take on that place your work is put in?
I think with a lot of my work before, it’s intentional, this is what I stand on, but with Blackward, I just wanted to make a book about Black people having, you know, joyful moments. But I think because of who I am, like previous work I’ve done, that just naturally comes through.
And sometimes people don’t know how to respond if it’s not political, if that’s not the intention, we can’t just have a regular story. I get asked that question at every, every event, “what do you hope people learn from this?” Like, I don’t know, I just want people to read it and have fun!
I know you’ve already got your next book, Buckle Up, coming next year at the time we’re talking here. Is there anything you took away from working on this book, any lessons or techniques that you’re taking with you to your next projects, anything you hope readers will notice?
It’s funny because Buckle Up technically is supposed to be my first graphic novel. I signed on to do that one in 2020, early 2021. And then I signed on with Drawn & Quarterly at the end of 2021, but I had already gone through doing this 200-plus-page graphic novel, so Blackward was done very fast. And then while I was working on Blackward, I went back to edit, Buckle Up, which is supposed to be my children’s book, but my adult one is having more fun with the cartooning.
(Drawn & Quarterly)
In my head [for Buckle Up] I was like, ‘Well, this needs to be a certain standard of middle-grade, YA and I’m gonna draw like this‘ and I’m supposed to be having as much fun as possible and I’m missing the opportunity to really push the cartooning. So, I went back and redrew stuff based off of what I did in Blackward, like what I should have did from the beginning because that’s my style and I shouldn’t try to change it.
I can’t tell you what to do but it’s just meant to be enjoyed, just go in and have fun. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you, that’s fine. But, you know, if it is for you, it’s just a joyful book. Both of them. There’s stuff you can learn, but the intent is for you to crack it open and have a little bit of joy.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has plenty to worry about as he seeks to bring order and fairness to America’s $100 trillion capital markets, and there are few issues that cause him more concern than the spread of artificial-intelligence technology.
In an exclusive interview with MarketWatch, the regulator argued that generative AI technologies in the vein of ChatGPT have the potential to revolutionize the way we invest by leveraging large data sets to “predict things that were unimaginable even 10 years ago,” but that these new powers will come with great risks.
“A growing issue is that [AI] could lead to a risk in the whole system,” Gensler said. “As many financial actors rely on one or just two or three models in the middle … you create a monoculture, you create herding.”
Gary Gensler: AI could pose ‘a risk in the whole system.’
This herding effect can be dangerous if there is a flaw in the model that might reverberate through markets during a time of stress, causing abrupt and unpredictable price changes in markets. Gensler pointed to the examples of cloud computing and search engines as markets for tech products that have quickly become dominated by one or two major players, and he said he worries about similar concentration in the market for AI technology.
The regulator said this issue is especially difficult because of the fragmented nature of the U.S. regulatory apparatus, which relies on the SEC to oversee securities markets while other agencies have responsibility for banks or commodity markets.
“This is more of a cross-entity issue,” Gensler said. “That’s the challenge for these new technologies.”
As SEC chair, Gensler has escalated his regulatory agency’s crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry in 2023 by launching lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, the two largest digital asset exchanges in the world by trading volume. The SEC alleges the two companies are operating unregistered securities exchanges in the U.S., but the companies say they are not running afoul of securities laws.
But AI is another issue that Gensler is starting to ring alarm bells over. There’s a little bit of irony because the promise of AI has largely been responsible for the S&P 500’s SPX
gains in 2023. The SEC chair said that his agency is already contemplating new rules to regulate artificial intelligence. For example, the SEC proposed a rule this summer to address conflicts of interest associated with stock brokers and investment advisors that leverage algorithms to predict and guide investor decisions through their smartphone applications or web interfaces.
The industry is pushing back on the proposal, arguing that existing rules are sufficient to prevent harm to investors and that a new rule would prevent brokers from using technology to create a better experience for clients.
Gensler said that the SEC benefits from such feedback, but still believes that regulators must be vigilant about the impact of these so-called predictive analytical tools. “If they do that to suggest a certain movie on a streaming app, okay,” he said. “But if they’re doing that about your financial help … we should address those conflicts.”
Sylvester Stallone is widely known as a pop culture icon, action hero, and recently, a reality TV star. But he probably deserves more credit as an auteur. About ten years ago, I watched every single movie Stallone had made until that time as the research for a piece on his filmography for The Dissolve. I took the assignment thinking I would enjoy revisiting the Rockymovies and might find a few diamonds in the rough of a long and winding career, I instead found a filmmaker who often writes, directs, produces and stars in his own projects, and whose body of work represents a decades-long consideration of heroic ideals, and a tribute to the values of hard work and tenacity.
And even with all of that background, I still learned a lot watching Sly, the new Netflix documentary about Stallone’s life. Mostly comprised of candid new interviews with the man himself, the film contains surprising revelations about Stallone’s journey from troubled kid to one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
The doc was directed by Thom Zimny, whose previous films include Elvis Presley: The Searcher and numerous projects about Bruce Springsteen. I was impressed with Sly, so I wanted to talk to Zimny about how he what he learned about Stallone during the process, why he chose to film his interviews in such an unusual way, and whether he sees any parallels himself between Springsteen and Stallone as artists.
You had to be a Sylvester Stallone to make this documentary. So I want to know when you became a fan. What era and what movies are we talking about?
I think I started being a Sylvester Stallone fan with the first Rocky, which I came to later. Not in the cinema, but really the early days of HBO, as a kid. All of a sudden I had this opportunity to watch it again and again, and I immediately connected.
Then years later I stumbled on Paradise Alley, and I was young enough for it to make a big impression. And then, as an adult, I was seeing other films — and I think I had just enough knowledge about [Stallone] in a general way to be very interested to learn more.
That’s what you want as a filmmaker, is to go through the process, not with a set point of view; to go through the process where you can unpack stories differently. You don’t want to go in locked with one particular vision. And the biggest thing I got with Sylvester, from the very first time I was talking to him, I realized that this was a guy whose story wasn’t told yet. And I realized too that he was tying in his own life story into these storylines, characters, their motivation. So all of a sudden I realized that I knew this guy, but I didn’t know him enough. And this is the journey of this doc.
About ten years ago, I worked for a film website that did a regular feature where a writer would watch and then write about every single thing that an artist had made. And when it was my turn to do one, I did Sylvester Stallone.
Wow.
Yeah. And I was certainly a fan of many Sylvester Stallone movies, but watching them all together I did gain a deeper appreciation of how this guy is so often speaking autobiographically through his characters. But I will admit I learned a lot watching your film; I had no idea, for example, about Stallone’s rough relationship with his father. It made me want to revisit something like Over the Top, which is overtly a movie about a father and son who have a very rough relationship. Now that you have done this film, talked to Stallone at length, watched all these movies, what other things do you think I might find buried in these subtext of his work if I go watch them again?
Working closely with Sly and then unpacking details of his childhood, the biggest gift that he left me with this film, this process as a director, is to be able to go back and look at the work through that POV now that I’ve learned so much about him. So I looked at every one of his movies differently, even Paradise Alley, which was this surreal little tale [about pro wrestling in the 1940s]; I now realize that it was a fantasy version of his New York upbringing.
Ah.
And it was tied into this boy’s Dead End Kids’ dream, and also had this redemption story of brothers and a family coming together. Paradise Alley is just one of the examples of how after working with him, I can’t help but look at the films differently.
That’s the side of the filmmaker I wanted to get at [in Sly]. I really felt like after the second interview, this is a filmmaker that a lot of people don’t grasp and understand to be someone who’s writing his own dialogue, telling his own story in many ways, many ways. The Rocky story was a reflection of his own experience. At the height of his stardom, he has the Rocky character going through the same things he was.
Right, absolutely.
So I felt like I needed to make a film that wouldn’t down every beat of his filmography or his life; I needed to make a film that examined the journey he has had as an artist and how he’s unpacked that through his art.
But yeah, suddenly all the films felt different. Nothing was just a casual hit. Cop Land was a film that I love, but going back to it now, when you realize how far he took himself as an actor. This is a guy who had demonstrated extreme strength and power in the Rambo movies, and other villains and heroes, and then took himself to this place of not being able to hear, being overweight, slouching, powerless, but then finding the sense of a hero in that character through a different way. It just showed me how how far he could go as an actor and how hard he worked towards this idea of hope and truth.
On a formal level, I thought it was interesting that you didn’t just film Stallone’s interviews in the standard, talking head sort of way. He’s never sitting down in this movie. He’s constantly on the move as he talks; walking around his house, his office, New York City. Why did you decide to shoot his interviews that way?
It’s a great question. The first time I met him was at his house in the office where I filmed — where the statues, the memorabilia is. And the first time we started chatting, we didn’t sit down. We stood up just the way the film has Sly doing the interviews. And I realized we were bouncing around the room going from subject to subject. And I thought to myself “This is the film is right here. This is the energy I want to hold onto.”
I wanted the idea of forgetting about camera to be the number one thing. So we needed to be ready to go anywhere at any time. And in this very large office, we did exactly that. We bounced around the room, and then he came to my edit room and he did the same thing where he saw the index cards that I had of his life, and he just responded. All that would happen spontaneously. There’s nothing staged. We would go four or five hours straight and then just be exhausted. And in that four to five hours, we covered all kinds of ground from, you know, childhood to Rocky, to his happiness with his family, to his sadness in his life. Everything was mixed. And I just had to keep up. I had to keep up with the energy of Sly because you might walk in with a preconceived idea and then all of a sudden the first answer he gives you takes you down a road that you never imagined.
More than once I thought he’s almost boxing with the camera; he’s kind of dancing like a boxer.
Yeah, definitely a little bit. And his voice in responding to questions, it’s music. There’s jazz to it. So you have to get in sync with him to have a conversation.
Another interesting component is you have him listen to these old tapes he had saved from decades-old interviews with other journalists. And listening to them now, sometimes he is really critical of his younger self. Which made me wonder: Has he seen your film, and did he respond in a similar, self-analyzing way?
The cassettes that are featured in the doc came from a suggestion from Sly’s producer, Braden Aftergood, who mentioned to me that he was at Sly’s office, and he opened up this desk and there was a box of cassettes, and we both just went, “I wonder what’s on there?” I think he would record sometimes himself, so he would have proof of what he was saying in the press in the early days. So it was a spontaneous moment. During the middle of an interview, I just turned to him and said, “What about those tapes?” And he literally just opens up the desk, pops one in. And as a filmmaker, that was a dream come true. because all of it was just happening there.
You have the young Sly’s voice and the older man critiquing him all within one shot. There’s a beautiful thing happening in that moment. The film itself is editing itself within one shot. There’s no crosscutting going on; there’s just this real moment of me questioning him, him putting in the tape, and then history comes back and he challenges it, or he laughs at it.
When he watched the film itself, he had moments where he would have laughter and enjoy the craziness of some of the details of his life, like his meeting Henry Winkler in LA after his car broke down. And we watched it a couple times together with his wife Jennifer. And he really was great because there were no boundaries set up. There was nothing like a list of things you cannot ask people.
After screening with him, he would give me stills that no one had ever seen before. All of it just made the film richer and richer, especially the imagery of off his iPhone with his dad at the end of his life. It was a key moment in the film that Sly himself gave to me.
You’ve made several films with Bruce Springsteen, and I can see some parallels between him and Stallone; they’re both sort of gruff chroniclers of the working class. Do you see similarities between them? How do their processes as artists compare?
In making films with people like Bruce or Sly, the one thing that I find really inspirational and that I find in both of them is this idea of work ethic. Bruce Springsteen has tons of notebooks from writing the album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, where he would pour over every line. And then I got to Sly’s place, and he had a bookshelf of Rocky notebooks. That same thing; these were school notebooks, 99 cent notebooks, right? Filled with dialogue ideas, script ideas. So that work ethic is a common thread that I see in both of those men. And they obviously came from the same generation. Rocky and Born to Run both come out of that same era.
That’s true.
And they also have ties to a certain exploration of working men in America. And both reflect to me people still creating and still hungry to figure out both the past and the present. So for me, it’s a great honor to work with them in the space of telling stories of their lives and their work, but also I’m really always influenced by that sort of passion. When you see the amount of work that these guys would do over a single song or a script idea, you can’t help but feel inspired.
Well, that connects back to Rocky. In the first movie especially. Rocky doesn’t even want to win the match with Apollo. It’s not about that. It’s about work, and proving you can “go the distance.”
At one point, [Stallone told me] he wished he could play all the Rocky films from beginning to end, because it shows that trajectory of life and the losses and the love and the changes.
We’re almost out of time, but I am curious: Because spent so much time with Stallone and his films for this, is there one of his movies you would recommend as a hidden gem?
That’s a tough one. I do still think there’s so much more to get out of Cop Land. I’ve spent a lot of time with the filmography. I’ve watched everything, but I look at Cop Land and go “There’s still more here to explore.” After I got to know [Stallone’s] life story more, it hit me so much harder. I feel like that’s the one that I can keep going back to.
Sly premieres on Netflix on November 3.
The 10 Most Ridiculous Tropes In Action Movies
Good luck finding an action movie that doesn’t have at least a few of these stereotypes.
President Joe Biden said Sunday the U.S. is doing “everything in its power” to find 14 Americans being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In excerpts from an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” airing Sunday night, Biden called Hamas’s attack last week, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, including at least 30 Americans, “pure barbarism.”
“I say we’re going to do everything in our power to find them,” Biden told CBS News’ Scott Pelley, about the American hostages. “Everything in our power. And I’m not going to go into the detail of that, but there’s — we’re working like hell on it.”
Biden also said the U.S. can easily handle supporting its allies in simultaneous wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world,” Biden said. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense. We have the capacity to do this and we have an obligation … to paraphrase the former secretary of state: If we don’t, who does?”
Following our first Razer interview that focused on the Razer Kishi V2 and mobile, I had a chance to chat with Ali Homayounfar ( Marketing Manager for Kitsune) and Kevin Macleod (Product Development for Kitsune) alongside Will Powers (PR) about Razer’s new Kitsune arcade controller, the hardware, working with FGC pros, collaboration plans, going Tournament Legal, and a lot more. Longtime readers of TouchArcade and mobile controller enthusiasts might recognize the name Kevin Macleod. He used to run AfterPad and has been doing great stuff for fans of playing mobile games with controllers for a long time. This interview will focus on the Razer Kitsune, and it was conducted on a video call. It was then transcribed and edited for brevity in the case of some parts.
TouchArcade (TA): How has the response been from the FGC and everyone else for the Razer Kitsune?
Ali Homayounfar (AH): So we’ve been FGC for quite a long time actually. We started with the Evo Panthera fight stick, so it’s actually a fight stick with a proper joystick, and we were pretty dominant in the FGC for quite a few years. We sponsored pro players like Fuudo on our team. Then we didn’t sell that product anymore. So I would say for a little bit, we were kind of in the shadows.
So with the Kitsune, we want to make a big statement with that product, and so far it’s been great. The reception from the FGC community has been awesome. We had a ton of pro players and influencers reach out to us directly just wanting the products you know, like no money or anything like that, but they really saw the quality, especially at EVO when they got to try it and test it. We say feeling is believing. I think EVO really helped us to showcase it to everybody there. We also had it, I believe, at Gamescom and and TGS this year. So far the reception has been way better than we expected.
TA: What made you decide to go leverless and like an all button controller for this one?
AH: It is like what everyone’s trending towards. Top pro players like Daigo Umehara, he’s been in the game for 20 years. You know, 25 years and these guys are all old school, in the arcades, in Japan, playing on joystick for decades. You even saw them starting to transition a leverless. That’s something that we all kind of saw as well. You just have better inputs. I’ve said it before, but you can do faster execution, better execution, jump is its own button, so it eliminates a lot of risk in error for doing, you know, accidentally forward jumps and stuff like that. But especially with our Razer keyboard tech and experience we have, we could do a really cool leverless option.
Doing a joystick is cool, like I said. I was a joystick user my whole life. I used Kitsune full time now. But with that, it is a really thick JLF piece. That’s a really thick JF piece. You can’t do as many cool things with it like you said with Steam Deck and portability, if you had that big JLF, it’d be a lot tougher to make it so slim and sleek like we did with Kitsune as well.
Kevin Macleod (KM): I would say that it is all sort of tied into the story of the entire product as Ali was hinting at there. Once we made that decision to focus on the all buttons, everything else clicked. We could shrink it down and do this portability angle. We could use our keyboard tech for these optical switches for faster actuation than you get with mechanical switches, so everything in the product came together all at once when we made that decision. If we were still trying to cram in the joystick idea there, we could have done it, but there would be different tradeoffs. I don’t think it would have been quite as impactful as it’s (Kitsune) been on the market.
TA: Ali mentioned in a prior interview that Razer worked with a lot of pros in the community and the FGC for advice on the stick and all. How is it working with someone like Justin Wong on this?
AH: It has been great. I’ve known Justin for I don’t know, almost five years. I worked with him at my old company as well. We actually sponsored them at the previous company I was at, so it was easy to kind of get him on board to help with the Kitsune doing some consulting for us.
It was great. I mean getting his feedback. Obviously he’s been in the scene for, I don’t know, 20 years. Same with Daigo (Umehara). I think he and Daigo are both legends in FGC, so to kind of get his consulting and stuff on the product was great. He’s done a few tutorial videos too. If you go on our socials, we did a Kitsune tutorial with Justin Wong.
TA: Kevin mentioned how everything came together when you decided to not do a stick. So besides wanting to go leverless, what features did you have in mind from the start that you wanted to make sure were in your new arcade controller?
Kevin Macleod (KM): The key I would say for any of this stuff is responsiveness. If you’re talking about an arcade controller, first and foremost, it has to be immediately responsive and reliable at all times. Just as soon as we started the project, I basically knew we had to go with our optical key switches. Those are our best of the best in terms of responsiveness. They have a relatively low travel distance, but not too low. They actuate without having any mechanical issues or debounce or anything like that, so it’s just an optical beam. When it’s blocked, you know that the input has gone through, so it’s extremely reliable from that standpoint.
We knew we wanted to be officially licensed. We wanted to work with Sony, and we wanted to work on PS5, all above board and tournament legal. We knew we wanted to be really optimized for a tournament setting, so we actually spent quite a bit of time designing our cable latch system in the back of it so that you can insert your USB C cable, and you don’t have any worry about it being pulled out or something like that if somebody trips on it because you’ll lose your game if that happens. We knew we wanted it to look really cool. From my standpoint, at least, that decision to do the aluminum design, the Chroma LED lighting, all that stuff really came together right away. We have really good designers at Razer and they were able to give us something that looks, I think, really incredible and unique.
TA: Going back to the cable you mentioned. That’s one of the things I see spoken about a lot. The tournament lock and the cable are very well designed. Obviously you know this, but there are people who buy controllers like modding their controllers with the buttons, stick, etc. I’ve seen some people mention that you don’t actually sell replacement cables and buttons. Are those planned for the roadmap to start selling these extra parts or different colors?
KM: I would say stay tuned on that. Like we, we know there is a desire for that, and we intend on addressing it one way. Those are not completely proprietary parts or anything like that by any means. They’re MX mount buttons. It would be fairly easy for somebody else to design compatible buttons on that. The cable is a standard IF certified USB C cable. So we designed this to be compatible with a wide range of cables. We know that people actually can have a lot of customization with cables and get some cool stuff. We don’t want to dictate that they have to use ours or something like that. Everything is designed to be relatively standards compliant.
AH: Yeah, if you go on Reddit or Twitter, even today I saw a bunch of people doing some hot swapping with switches with the Kitsune. With different kinds of wraps and other stuff. So it is possible, like Kevin said, they’re not proprietary. You could swap it with different switches.
TA: Building on the customization aspect. When the Cammy and Chun-li editions were announced, I thought those were actually printed on the aluminum, but they are decals applied to it right?
KM: Yeah, they are a decal like a thick 3M laminate that goes on like a vinyl wrap on there. We opted for that solution on those editions.
AH: The durability is similar to a car wrap.It’s very, very durable. So I think it’s like the 2080 material that people use on cars. So it’s a pretty durable wrap.
TA: Are there any plans to start selling collaboration wraps or branded ones officially on the site this year or is it another state tuned situation?
AH: It’s something we’re definitely thinking about, something we’re talking over with the team, so nothing finalized. Obviously people have been asking us for different customizations and skins, and we actually own our own print facility. We acquired a company that has our print facility that’s close to our office. It is something we’re definitely talking about.
KM: We’ve also, we don’t know if we have published or if we’re going to publish shortly the schematics for how people can print their own skins and the plate dimensions and all that stuff. But we expect people to be able to do those OK? Yeah.
AH: So the template for you to do your own designs is on razer.com right now. We are selling custom skins right now, kind of like our Quartz and Mercury. Similar ones that we have on our laptops, I think those skins are available for Kitsune for now.
TA: And Kevin mentioned Chroma. What I wanted to know, is would the Kitsune respond to game changes like you see with the DualSense controller light bar in select games. Would the Kitsune change colors based on characters used or something like that in the future like if I choose Chun Li, it would change to blue?
KM: It’s not possible at this time. We could certainly do that on PC at some point. We could do integration with our Synapse technology on PC, and then any games that are designed to integrate with Chroma would take advantage of that. But we didn’t do that at launch. The focus at launch was doing something that’s really great in cross platform with PS5 and PC. I would say that could come at some point down the line, but it is not part of the product right now. We do have a reactive mode where the lights will kind of flash with each button press that you make. So there is reactive lighting to it, but there isn’t a Chroma integration with Synapse at this time.
TA: Let’s now move to questions for Ali. You’ve been to EVO, TGS, CEO, and tons of these events, and have been playing fighting games since the early days as we said before. I wanna know what you think about the current state of arcade sticks and controllers outside the Kitsune. Like what have you been using before this, what are your favorites, and what do you think of the current state of arcade controllers?
AH: I mean, I’m kind of biased because I used to work at Victrix, so I worked on the Victrix Pro FS 12 and Pro FS. So obviously, before Razer, those were the peripherals I was using. Overall I’m just happy with how FGC is this year. I think with Mortal Kombat 1 just launching, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, you have Project L. I’m just super happy to see these fighting games and the community doing so well. I think with Kitsune too, just how well it has been doing. Sometimes you know, a lot of companies and stuff, maybe focus on like FPS and Call of Duty because there’s a lot of revenue there and stuff like that. So I’m really happy to see that the FGC is thriving. We call it the Golden Age this year. Because of all the new games and it’s just been so long since we’ve had, like, a new Street Fighter and stuff like that. I’m really happy to see how it’s been and yeah, for all the other preferred rules like, you know, I’m friends with a lot of those companies and happy for them as well. We are all doing great and the community is, I think, stronger for that as well.
TA: So have you had a chance or have you looked into the new Sanwa JLX stick which they launched a few months ago?
AH: So I haven’t tried that one yet. Since yeah, since I’ve been using leverless, I haven’t been messing with the the joysticks as much, but it is something I wanna get my hands on, and I think that’s one cool thing I’d say about Razer too, is even the buttons like to what Kevin was talking about, we make our own button caps, our own switches, you know, other companies, they have to go through like Sanwa, you know, they have to order through Japanese distributor get the JLF get the get the buttons. I think that’s the kind of unique thing with Razer compared to other companies is that we make this all internally. We don’t have to go through a middleman, distributor or stuff like that. We are the only optical switches out there too, which is cool on a fight stick to leverless whatever you wanna call it.
TA: One aspect which a lot of people haven’t spoken about, is that if you wanna buy a leverless controller right now, you usually like, pre Kitsune, you have to wait for something to come in stock, order from a specialty, or something. With Razer, maximum distribution among anything related to the FGC, so that is a huge boost to leverless.
AH: Yeah, 100%.
KM: It’s a product that’s historically been sold like a niche product. Where you kind of have to go to online distributors and get things and wait in line. I don’t think it’s a niche category. None of us do. We think that the all button design is mainstream, and is probably going to be the big design going forward. We didn’t want to restrict it to that. We thought it deserved to go mainstream.
AH: Having the license too, one huge thing with that, if you buy like you know from another company that kind of does their in-house stuff with like their Brooks converter and stuff like that.
We are PS5 licensed, so no matter how many updates Sony gives us, we’re going to be compatible no matter what. With other companies they would have to do a firmware fix. One cool thing about going with a PS5 license as well, is that, no matter what, you go to tournament, it’s not going to disconnect on you or you have to do updates and stuff like that. I think that’s a huge advantage besides our distribution as well.
TA: So you mentioned going with PS5 like, working with them for being an officially licensed stick. If the Razer Kitsune does well enough, do you think you will do one for another platform?
Will Powers (WP): If there’s ever consumer demand we can, we can always address that by creating a product. We’ve done that a million times. I don’t think you’ll ever hear anyone at Razer say we will never make something, because it’s just not the way we operate. If there’s demand, we’ll create a product.
Kevin then went on to talk about how the Kitsune was also built to be a first class experience for PC players.
KM: Our focus for Kitsune is that we wanted to do something rock solid for PC as well. We wanted to make sure that Kitsune wasn’t just a killer PS5 controller, but that we went all out on the PC mode. It’s usually an afterthought with controllers, so when you flip this to PC mode like the touch pad actually functions as a PC trackpad with multi touch input and scrolling and all that stuff, as you would expect on a PC controller. It shows up via Xinput with all of the traditional button layouts that you would expect. Any PC game that supports the Xbox controllers will automatically work with Kitsune. No mapping required, nothing like that. We wanted to make sure that we were a first class citizen on both of those platforms. That would be what I’d say on that.
TA: So you mentioned Riot’s Project L above. Are there any plans to do collaborations with fighting games like that with say Project L or Mortal Kombat 1 skins? I know I saw a Mortal Kombat 1 posted online, but wasn’t sure whether it was for sale or not.
AH: We made that one for Warner Brothers. For Evo they reached out to us asking if they could have Kitsunes at their EVO booth. They asked if they could do their own Mortal Kombat design. We said, yeah, of course. So we gave them a template. They made that Fire God Liu Kang edition. We printed it and we put it on for them. It was a one off collaboration.
(Note: Ali was visiting Riot for Project L soon after this interview was conducted as you can see in the Tweet below).
It was awesome visiting the @riotgames campus! We brought some custom Kitsunes alongside 🐍 🐍 🐍. Can’t wait for Project L! pic.twitter.com/JyYSQldfTq
TA: With the Kitsune, my main worry about the skins is messing up applying them. I’m bad with applying skins or screen guards and have never used those things for a long time. When I get the Kitsune, I’m going to be sweating bullets trying to apply the skins correctly.
AH: Just for you to know as well, at EVO, we applied, I mean like 50 skins because we got the whole shipment in for EVO. We did the Warner Brothers skins, the Cammy and Chun Li skins, all while setting up. We all kind of pitched in and helped, and it was pretty easy, honestly.
Because it’s such a big square you know what I mean? You can line up the button holes and stuff. We were all kind of nervous like you, and like, everyone did it really, really easily. I’m talking about people that don’t even use this stuff. They did it pretty flawlessly. So yeah, don’t get too worried.
KM: Just to be clear, the Street Fighter 6 edition ones, all of the skin is pre applied.
AH: The ones you get, those are already from the factory.
TA: Now let’s move to questions for Kevin. Let’s go back a bit to AfterPad, then Gamevice, and now Razer. How did you go from mobile controllers to the Kitsune?
KM: I got my start doing a website talking about MFi controller compatible games back in the day, after iOS 7 came out, and I ended up reviewing a bunch of mobile controllers, and that’s how I met the CEO of Razer as part of that process. Eventually that turned into me getting a job at Gamevice who ended up collaborating with Razer later down the line for the Kishi V1 controller. I ended up moving over to Razer and working on the Kishi V2 controller, and then sort of took over the product development at Razer for the console line as well. The console controllers and mobile controllers at Razer, and Kitsune is actually the first product at Razer that I kicked off myself. That’s the first one that I’ve done from the beginning. I came up with a spec for it, and kicked that off myself, and now it’s out on store shelves and the reaction’s been great. So it’s been, it’s been an exciting journey.
TA: You mentioned working on the Kishi. I assume you also worked on both the Android and the iPhone Kishi V2 as well.
KM: Yes.
TA: Were you also involved with the Nexus app in any way?
KM: Yes, I’m also the product developer for Nexus. I’m the product developer for the Kishi hardware controllers, and the Nexus mobile app on iOS and Android.
TA: As Razer, have you done any official testing with the Steam Deck for the Kitsune?
KM: Yeah, we’ve tested, I believe with Kitsune. We show up as Kitsune when you’re using Steam. You can map all of the buttons to whatever you want to in all of those games that would be compatible with Steam Deck, so yeah, I would know that we’re compatible there. Mobility was a core thing that we wanted to focus on with Kitsune, the ability to carry it with you where you go. We focused on it being like the size between an iPad and a small laptop, and to fit into any context where you would carry one of those.
TA: Since you’ve now worked on mobile controllers, console controllers, and also on an arcade controller, do you think we will reach a point where Razer specifically can make something which officially supports PlayStation, iPhone, iPad and PC together or is that something which the first parties would not allow?
KM: PlayStation, iPhone and PC together could be doable. Those could be doable. Where you start to see issues is if you try to do cross platform on consoles. But as long as you’re only on one console, you should be okay with doing compatibility with all the rest, I think.
TA: I’m obviously gonna try the Kitsune on the iPad when I get it, but I don’t even know if that’s gonna work. You probably have tried that.
KM: There’s nothing that prevents us from adding support to it. We would work with Apple to get them some units, and they could add support to iOS for Kitsune. We actually work on Android because it shows up as a standard controller mapping on Android, so there’s nothing at this point preventing it. Apple switched to USB C with everything now, the rules for adding compatibility for devices have been relaxed quite a bit in recent years on the iOS side of things. We could get them units and they would be able to add support to iOS and iPad.
TA: Having now covered controllers for longer than most people I’d say, what would you like to see in controllers going forward? Stuff that isn’t standardized yet specifically.
KM: I would say with controllers that they’ve all converged on sort of a similar design, similar quality, similar feature sets over the years. The basic shape and layout of the controller I think is standard for a reason. People like that design and people like the controller buttons to be where you expect them to be. So whenever people try to make significant changes to that, it never goes well. So that’s from a game controller standpoint I don’t think you’re going to see, I don’t want to focus on trying to reinvent the wheel. What I wanna focus on in general with controllers going forward and what I expect others to do as well, is really polishing up the basics of what a controller experience is and adding additional features where it makes sense in a way that doesn’t get in the way of what people’s expectations for a controller are. So when you look at our key mobile controllers like those are traditional style, console controller layouts, our microswitch buttons that you get from our high end console controllers, we just brought those to a mobile size, and when you look at our high end console controllers, our Wolverine V2 chroma on the Xbox side or Wolverine V2 Pro, we’ve started with the basic sheet people expect.
Then we’ve added Mecha-Tactile buttons, Mecha-Tactile d-pad, programmable paddles, and locking triggers. We augment what people are expecting out of a controller, and do things that only Razer can do, in a way that only we can do to make things better. I would expect to see more of that going forward.
Will then goes on to talk about Razer’s cross collateralization of research and R&D as we discussed in our prior interview.
WP: Whether it’s the aluminum chassis or the switches, we didn’t start from Ground Zero for those with Kitsune. We were able to bring this to market so quickly because we have those resources.
KM: It is a good point. With Kitsune really, it is building off of everything that we’ve done historically at Razer, and that was actually one of the key things that I wanted to focus on with. What do we have that we can bring that puts a Razer identity on this market, that brings the research and development that we have spent on technologies that other people don’t have access to? What can we do to leverage these in the fighting game community? When I said earlier that everything sort of came together at once when we came up with the design of the product, that’s part of what I meant, because we already had these things. We know how to do extremely low latency, key switch-based buttons. We do it with our gaming keyboards. So we already had those parts ready to go. They just hadn’t been used in this context and we know how to do a unibody aluminum design. We do it with our laptop, so we were able to bring that over to this space. We know how to do killer lighting. We’ve been doing it for years on this, so every time that it came to think about what features we need to do here, we already had something that we had had a lot of experience with and we brought all of that over. I do think that’s why it doesn’t feel like a product that just came out. It feels like a product that’s been ready to be made for a long time now.
We’d like to thank Ali Homayounfar, Kevin Macleod, and Will Powers from Razer for their time here.
Stay tuned for more arcade controller coverage on TouchArcade in the future. If you think we should cover a specific controller or do more interviews like this, feel free to let us know.
Another Feral Interactive interview in the same year? Could it be? Well, yes. Feral Interactive keeps bringing out more quality releases across platforms we cover, and I’m always up to talk porting, hardware, and more. While I spoke to Feral Interactive about Sid Meier’s Railroads, I’ve been wanting to also talk to the publisher and developer about its Nintendo Switch releases. With Company of Heroes coming to Switch as the Company of Heroes Collection, I knew it was the right time for a new interview. This one will focus on the Switch, optimizing a game built for keyboard and mouse for a controller on Nintendo Switch, game tutorials, and more.
TouchArcade (TA): It has been a few months since I interviewed you, and we’ve seen some interesting hints and announcements leading up to this new launch. While the last interview was for a mobile launch, we are now focusing on Nintendo Switch. Could you share your knowledge on the Nintendo Switch hardware and how it compares to mobile devices?
Feral Interactive (FI): The Nintendo Switch is a dedicated games console, so all its power is reserved for playing games. Mobile operating systems are designed for all sorts of tasks, making for compromises in the gaming department.
That said, the Switch hardware is now getting a little long in the tooth. It’s based on a 2015 Nvidia chip, customized with lower CPU and GPU speeds to extend battery life.
The Switch CPU, in particular, is not as powerful as that found in most modern mobile devices, so a lot of time is spent ensuring a balance of resources between all 3 CPU cores and the GPU for the best overall performance. This sounds simple, but can take significant engineering before performance meets release standards.
TA: With Alien: Isolation, we saw a game you released on Switch come to mobile, but Company of Heroes is the other way around. How has it been working on the codebase going from mobile to Switch?
FI: GRID Autosport was released on mobile before Switch, so we have done it both ways round — the only thing left to do is both platforms at the same time!
When going from mobile to Switch, the main focus areas are interface and optimization. The Switch needs a gamepad-centric interface (as opposed to touch, which is the focus on mobile). We alluded above to the challenge of getting games performant on Switch: a lot of time is spent optimizing games to make sure they perform well — and perform consistently.
In moving from Switch to mobile, a lot of the performance optimization will already have been done. This is a great foundation to build on, and that often facilitates better performance on the most powerful, top-end devices. It also allows more focus on things like additional input methods (touch, keyboard & mouse), and redesigning the user experience (UX) dynamically to adapt to various screen sizes.
There’s no one preferred route. Both have their challenges. While there is more power to work with on mobile, there is also a huge variety of devices. Optimizing for and testing hundreds of different phones and tablets takes a lot of time: they all have different screen sizes, chipsets, RAM, operating system versions, driver versions, etc. On Switch, the optimization challenges are tougher, but that can be offset by developing for a single device — the limitations of which are well understood.
TA: You already confirmed to me that there are no plans to bring controller support to mobile for Company of Heroes, but I’m curious about the challenges involved in translating a game like this from touch or keyboard & mouse to a controller for Switch.
FI: This is an evolution of our mobile work. Over the last few years, we have learned a lot about how to adapt games’ control mechanisms while retaining the feel of the gameplay.
With Company of Heroes, the UX and controls had already been reworked for touchscreens, so we were familiar with the challenges… The biggest one for a gamepad is to group controls and actions so they flow naturally. This requires a lot of iteration of the control mapping. For Company of Heroes, there are many different command actions, but, whether the player is using a Commander Ability, issuing a unit command, or building, the inputs and steps must be consistent and feel “right.”
It is relatively easy to come up with a mapping that works for 8 out of 10 commands. The real test is ensuring the final 2 maintain that coherent feel.
So, significant effort goes into iterating on the control system for consistency, ensuring similar actions follow similar flows of button presses. Adding or moving a single command can have knock-on effects that flow across the entire controller mapping, so you need to review the impact of a change on the entire experience.
Finally, when it comes to controls in RTS games, players have different preferences for how certain features should work. After extensive testing and iteration, options were added to allow players of all skill levels to customize their experience. For example, the game can automatically deselect units after issuing a construction order, auto-open the building wheel when a base structure is selected, and invert unit facing when issuing a command. These and similar additions all help to make it feel like the game fits the player, rather than demand that the player conforms to its demands.
We also needed to update all the UX elements to work with a controller, but I think we’ve gone into enough detail already!
TA: Was there any input or reference taken from the team doing Company of Heroes 3 for PS5 and Xbox Series X in bringing over Company of Heroes to Nintendo Switch for its interface and controls?
FI: We have worked with Relic [Entertainment] for well over a decade, and have a great relationship. We discuss concepts with them on all our Relic projects, including Company of Heroes for Switch. But, while the fundamentals of Company of Heroes and Company of Heroes 3 are similar, there are a lot of gameplay differences between the two, and that limits the potential for close collaboration.
TA: What led to choosing Company of Heroes over something like ROME: Total War for Feral Interactive’s first PC-focused game coming to Nintendo Switch?
FI: As a company, Feral has tried to stage its development one platform at a time — sequenced to allow us to gain the knowledge that provides a sound basis for tackling the next platform.
ROME: Total War on iPad was the first mobile release, and an ideal starting point because, for a mobile device, it has a relatively large screen and a limited number of form factors.
Once the iPad version was released and well received, we started developing an iPhone version, redesigning and optimizing the interface to display large amounts of complex information on a smaller screen.
We then moved on to Android, which has a much wider variety of hardware than iOS, so poses more technical and QA challenges than it does design.
The decision to bring Company of Heroes rather than ROME: Total War is predicated on the differences in their gameplay. The former is an RTS game with various campaigns, all played out inside a real-time 3D environment. The Total War series has that same RTS element, alongside a turn-based strategy component, with many screens of detailed text and statistics. That presents a significant additional obstacle to what is already a challenging design and development task.
So, before anything else, let’s see how the Company of Heroes Collection is received on Switch!
TA: You mentioned there were some plans for looking into a physical release, and I’m curious whether this is something you will discuss in the near future?
FI: We know that there are plenty of Switch gamers who would like a physical copy, however, Company of Heroes will be a digital-only release at launch. The economics are such that it is hard to make them work for physical releases, and, while there are physical versions of a couple of our Switch releases on the way, there are no firm plans for Company of Heroes.
TA: What should players expect in terms of resolution and frame rate in docked and handheld modes?
The aim is a consistent 30fps at native resolution (1080p docked and 720p undocked), and anti-aliasing is used to sharpen the 3D elements. It took a lot of engineering to get every drop of performance from the Switch by parallelising tasks over the CPU cores and the GPU.
TA: Will the Switch version have the mobile touch support interface when played in handheld mode?
FI: Although there are touch controls on mobile, they are not the best fit for the Switch, which is controlled using Joy-Cons in both handheld and docked modes.
There are a couple of reasons for this: the entire game’s UX and controls have been designed to use Joy-Cons. Implementing a touch interface solely for the handheld experience is hard to justify, and we preferred to focus our efforts on Joy-Con support.
Also, holding a Switch to use touch controls similar to Company of Heroes on mobile is physically uncomfortable!
TA: Are you utilizing HD Rumble in the Company of Heroes Collection on Switch??
FI: No, there are no areas in the game which lend themselves to that feature.
TA: A bit offtopic, this announcement got me thinking about how Feral Interactive did Dawn of War II for macOS and Linux, but not the original game. Are there plans to bring Dawn of War to mobile or Switch?
FI: That is a great suggestion. We’ll take it under advisement.
TA: I adore Company of Heroes on iPad, and I’m hoping it serves as a great entry point into the genre for Switch owners who have not sampled it yet. Feral Interactive’s tutorials are amazing. Will you be doing similar videos for the Switch version of Company of Heroes?
FI: Glad you appreciate the online tutorials. A lot of thought and effort goes into them because we want people to get the best from the games we release.
The Switch lacks a web browser for accessing YouTube, so help has to be delivered differently.
Instead, dynamic prompts illustrate and expose controls to the player in-game. Control prompts are also smaller and easier to list than describing a gesture, which makes them ideal for Switch.
There are also additional controller layout visuals in the pause menus and updated in-game tutorials to round out the Help.
TA: Company of Heroes on Switch is releasing as Company of Heroes Collection with all DLC, but multiplayer isn’t being included at launch. Is there anything else coming later on with patches in terms of optimization or additional features barring multiplayer?
FI: Apart from online multiplayer, there are no planned post-release updates. Our aim is to deliver a polished and complete game from the outset. We’re old-fashioned like that!
TA: Has there been any progress for Company of Heroes multiplayer on mobile? Will it have cross play with Switch?
FI: Work on cross-platform multiplayer between mobile and Switch has been underway for some time. The plan is to start with a multiplayer beta on Android in early 2024, then follow that with iOS and Switch multiplayer updates later in the year.
TA: Since Feral Interactive is handling the new Switch and prior mobile versions of Company of Heroes, are there plans for cross progression / save?
FI: Supporting cross-platform multiplayer is in the works, but cross-platform save games for the single player is not. Each platform uses a distinct save game system, and they are technically incompatible for a number of reasons.
TA: So far, Feral Interactive has been focusing on Switch on the console side. Are there plans to bring any of your titles to PS5 and Xbox in the future?
FI: There have been a number of requests… There are no immediate plans, but “message received!”
TA: What are your thoughts on the current state of mobile and console gaming for premium games?
FI: Game development never stands still. So, while mobiles are getting more powerful, the specifications for AAA games are increasing — which makes for a continually moving target.
With Apple’s latest A17 chip adding even more GPU performance, and Qualcomm soon to release their latest chipset for Android devices, the possibilities keep on expanding.
Another challenge is install size. Mobile app stores have an initial install limit of either 2GB or 4GB, depending on the deployment method. With AAA games often 10 to 20 times larger than this, it’s sometimes impossible, however good the compression techniques, to get all of a game’s content within those limits. That means players are often required to download further data after the initial download of a 4GB app, which is not a great user experience. Better support for large applications on mobile app stores is very much on the wanted list!
In regard to console: our focus is on Nintendo Switch. We are excited to be bringing great games to the platform, and are thrilled with the reception they have had. Of course, most of us here at Feral are gamers, and we play a lot of the big releases outside our target platforms. 2023 has been a great year for games, and we’re looking forward to what 2024 brings on both the software and hardware side!
We’d like to thank everyone at Feral Interactive for their time here.
One of the cool things about my job is that every once in a while, I get to talk to the people behind the games. It’s always a pleasure. Well, today we have a really special one for you, dear friends. Mr. Yu Suzuki of Ys Net, the force behind such games as Space Harrier, Out Run, After Burner, Virtua Racing, Shenmue, Virtua Fighter, and countless other titles, agreed to answer some burning questions we had about his most recent game, Air Twister(). It released on Apple Arcade a while back and will be making its way to consoles on November 10th of this year via publisher ININ Games.
Before we go into the interview, I want to thank Mr. Suzuki for taking the time to answer these questions. I also want to thank ININ Games and Hound PR for facilitating this tremendous opportunity. Now, on with the show.
TouchArcade (TA): Hello Mr. Suzuki, thank you for your time. We usually start all our interviews with this question. What are your favorite pizza toppings?
Yu Suzuki (YS): Tomatoes. Sauce or otherwise.
TA:Air Twister is seen by many as a spiritual successor to your earlier game, Space Harrier. What made you want to revisit that kind of game now?
YS: It all started when I visited Apple headquarters and talk heated up about the possibility of creating a title for Apple Arcade that could be played over and over again, just like a classic arcade game.
TA: What is your personal favorite aspect of Air Twister and why?
YS: It is a 3D world, but in that 3D world enemies move in 2D. It feels good in a “feels weird” kind of way.
TA: Air Twister originally debuted as a mobile game on Apple Arcade. Can you tell us about any development or design challenges you might have had in bringing the game over to consoles?
YS: We initially developed the game using a gamepad and then adapted it to touchscreen controls. Because we did it this way, we did not have to make any major changes to the UI or controls, so it was not much of an issue.
TA: Many of the past hits you worked on were arcade games. Can you tell us if and how the experience of making those kinds of games helped shape the creation of Air Twister?
YS: I of course drew from Space Harrier, but I was also able to utilize my experience with touchscreen controls from a game I worked on called Psy-Phi.
TA: The world and creature design of Air Twister is very striking. Can you tell us about how those designs came about and some of the inspirations behind them?
YS: There is a wide range of enemies, from biological creatures to machines, but they all fit within the framework of the Air Twister world. I wanted to keep creating new things by combining this and that, but at the same time had to rein it in so they did not stray from that framework standard I had in my head.
TA: The soundtrack to Air Twister is as awesome as it is unexpected. What went into your decision to ask Valensia to do the music for the game, and what kind of input did you have on it?
YS: I have been a fan of Valensia for a long time and thought his music just went so well with fantasy. When we had the Air Twister prototype in hand, I matched it up with some of Valensia’s songs and was convinced it was the best fit. And while I didn’t know if he was still active as an artist, I looked him up on social media to get in touch. I introduced myself and straight out said I wanted to work with him.
TA: As someone who has been part of the games industry almost from the start, what would you say is the most exciting thing about modern video games compared to past ones?
YS: The evolution of game engines, the expansion of the mobile game market, the popularity of VR, and the rapid evolution of computers are just a few of the things I am excited about.
TA: Any chance Princess Arch might buy a red sports car and go drive around enjoying the passing breeze in her next adventure?
YS: I would love to make that game 😄
TA: Thanks again for your time, Mr. Suzuki. Is there any message you would like to give our readers about Air Twister?
YS: Air Twister is an easy game to pick up and play, and I hope that more people will enjoy playing a game that brings back the feeling of the good old arcade game. I also hope that veteran gamers will enjoy the “on pins and needles” play of the Arcade Mode.
Once again, a big thanks to Mr. Suzuki, ININ Games, and Hound PR for making this interview possible. Air Twister is currently available on Apple Arcade, and will be available digitally and physically through ININ Games on November 10th of this year for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It will also be available digitally for Windows on the same date.
As a kid growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s, a handful of movies captivated my imagination, most of them the obvious titles you would expect: Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Raiders of the LostArk.Clearly I had a type: Epic adventures with enormous effects, lots of humor, and a happy ending.
The one exception to the rule was La Bamba, the 1987 musical biography about rock and roll legend Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), who shot to stardom by the age of 17 and died just a few months later in the tragic plane crash that came to be known as “The Day the Music Died.” In a compact 108 minutes, La Bamba captures both the highs and the lows; energetic concert sequences (with Valens music performed by Los Lobos) are interspersed with scenes that emphasize the hardships Ritchie faced in 1950s California, including poverty, racism, and his complex relationship with his half-brother Bob (Esai Morales), who adored Ritchie but was also intensely jealous of his potential and perpetually frustrated with his own lack of opportunities, a toxic mix that inflamed Bob’s alcoholism and his abuse of his family members.
Despite its sad ending and serious themes, La Bamba became one of my most-watched movies when I was young. In an era where musical biopics are even more commonplace, it remains a deeply moving film with outstanding music and performances; few modern biographies can hold a candle to its swaggering rock energy and devastating finale. So I was delighted to see the film added to the Criterion Collection — and even more excited when I was given the opportunity to speak to its director, Luis Valdez, about making the film and the unique power it continues to hold for both young and old audiences.
Actually, I was just looking at some of the features on the Criterion disc; wasn’t “Let’s Go” the original title of the movie before it became La Bamba?
Yes. But it was taken by another movie, fortunately, because La Bamba was so much better. The concern there was that people would think it was a foreign movie or something. [laughs] But actually, it worked in our favor, because “La Bamba” was already part of the rock and roll lexicon, even if they didn’t know what it meant. It worked out for us. It was serendipitous.
I really loved this movie as a kid. And when I mentioned that I was speaking to you to a couple friends, I heard the same response every day: “Oh man, I love La Bamba.” For a very tragic story, the movie really resonates with young audiences. I’m wondering if you had a younger audience in mind when you were writing it, and why you think young people who weren’t even alive when Ritchie was releasing music — and might not have even heard of him before — have such a strong reaction to this story.
Well, I think everybody, but particularly teenagers, have dreams of making it in the world, and especially in music or art. That’s a very youthful sort of motivation. So I think every young person can really identify with hopes and dreams of becoming a rock and roll musician. At the same time, I think young people still relate to their siblings in some ways, and they’re working their way through life, and the idea of sibling conflict is pretty close to them. Now some people never outgrow sibling conflict, but most people do; they mature and they realize their siblings are human beings like they are. But when you’re a teenager, the idea of conflicting with your younger or older siblings is a way of life, you know?
I got those stories directly from Bob, who must have been in his 50s when I interviewed him. Those were his memories. And what’s good and noble about Bob is he took the blame onto himself. He said “I was the bad guy. I was the one that was giving Ritchie a lot of trouble.” He blamed it on his drinking. But the fact that he allowed me to do that … he said “Represent me in any way you want. Just tell the story.” And I think that was a tribute to him and to his maturity, but also his love for Ritchie.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the depiction of Bob, which is pretty unflinching; it doesn’t shy away from the things he did to Ritchie and especially to Rosie. You mentioned that you interviewed him and he gave you permission to tell the story how you saw fit. I am curious what he thought of the final movie when he saw it, because … I wouldn’t say he is the villain of the film, but he is certainly depicted in an unflattering light at times.
Well, let me back it up a little bit. The idea for the movie actually occurred at the premiere of my play, Zoot Suit, on Broadway. We were in my brother’s dressing room; he was playing one of the leads. We were on Broadway, and we were saying “Okay, we’ve done the ’40s, what are we going to do with the ’50s? We should come back with a rock and roll story. But what story can we tell?” And at that exact moment, we heard music coming from below the Winter Garden Theater on the Seventh Avenue side. Down below on the street, there was a group of mariachis serenading us. We didn’t know at the time, that this group had been sent by the President of Mexico to celebrate us on opening night. And they were playing “La Bamba.”
We recognized it right away and it answered our question: What should we do next? We looked at each other and we said “La Bamba!” That was the spark. Well, for the next five years, my brother Daniel took it upon himself to locate [Ritchie’s] family and do some of the research. But we couldn’t find the family. They weren’t in L.A. anymore. They weren’t in the San Fernando Valley.
It turns out that where we live, close to Monterey and Watsonville in this little mission town called San Juan Bautista, we have this local saloon called Daisy’s Saloon, which is very popular with bikers. One day, someone came over to my brother’s house and said “Hey, you know, Ritchie Valens’ brother is over at Daisy’s.” So he rushed over there and we made contact with Bob and Bob introduced us to his mother.
Knowing that I had no book and very few articles to go by, I decided to interview them on video tape, so that I could see their expressions. I interviewed both [Ritchie’s mother] Connie and Bob, and Bob Keane, Ritchie’s manager, and Donnie Ludwig of “Donna” fame. That was the basis of my screenplay, what they told me. And they were pretty honest. And Bob was the most honest of all. He said “I was a bastard. You tell whatever story you want to tell. But Ritchie was a nice guy. He was a great brother.”
I could tell there was still grief there, there was still a sense of guilt, actually. And so I told Bob, “Well, thank you. I’m gonna make a hero out of you.” And of course, it was more as an anti-hero as it turned out. But he was happy with the result. He said in interviews as we were promoting the movie that he felt that I had been a fly on the wall of the family’s house.
We needed Bob, because nobody had anything negative to say about Ritchie! Everybody universally said he was a nice guy; the best kind of son, the best kind of nephew, the best kind of friend you could ever have. I said, “Well, I can’t do much with this. He’s too good!”
[laughs]
So I kind of laid it on Bob, and made him the bad guy, make him the antagonist. But again, it’s an antagonist in terms of someone who loves his brother but can’t help himself but to compete with his brother.
In that five years of research, were there any points in the process where the film almost looked very different where the La Bamba we all know today? Did you make any drastic changes along the way?
Well, I’ll tell you. Once I’d done the research and did my outline, I was hired by Taylor Hackford and his company to write the script I think around November of ’85. And so I went into the screenplay over December. I had a draft by January and we were green-lighted in February. So that’s lightning speed as movies go. So the idea is that it came out almost like Venus out of the shell; it was fully formed already. I’ve written many screenplays since then and before that. And I must say that La Bamba was a sweetheart. It was really meant to be. It fell into place in every way. Within a year of really just sealing the deal to do the screenplay, we were in production. And that rarely happens. And the movie worked. The story worked on paper, and the movie worked on film.
What was your reaction about the film going into the Criterion Collection?
I’m very proud that the film has been accepted for the Criterion Collection. What it forebodes is the film will be remembered and preserved. I’m a fan of the Criterion Collection. It’s a tremendous resource, and it’s a treasury of great films, so to be included is a real honor.
If you’re out somewhere these days and “La Bamba” comes on the radio, what do you think about when you hear the song now?
When I hear it at different places, I’m able to connect with the tremendous impact that Ritchie Valens had on the world by taking this folk song and turning it into a rock and roll classic. It was his achievement, that young kid, way back when he was 17 years old.
We were more or less the same age; I am about six months older than Ritchie. And I remember those times. I remember the aspirations we had at that time, trying to be as American as we could be. And certainly the idea of becoming a rock star was the height. That was the top of the line, you know? And so to have “La Bamba” playing again, again, all over the world — and by the way, I’ve heard this song all over the world. That “La Bamba” is still played is one of Ritchie’s achievements. And I’m very proud of the fact that the film worked and that it remains meaningful to young people who maybe weren’t even born when the film was made, but nevertheless can relate to it because there’s the eternal spirit of his musicality and his genius captured in the story.
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