Four months after announcing plans to moveKhmai Fine Dining, chef Mona Sang is ready to reveal the new location of her decorated Cambodian restaurant in Rogers Park.
A rare Chicago specialist in Khmer cuisine hailed as one of the 15 Best New Restaurants in America in 2022, the restaurant will reopen in April at 6580 N. Sheridan Road on the ground floor of the Hampton Inn. Now two miles southeast from the original, Khmai will move into a larger and more modern space that’s owned by Loyola University. Close to the college’s campus, the space previously housed Onward Chicago from Michael Olszewski, ex-owner of three-Michelin-starred Grace and one-starred Yugen.
Though staying in Rogers Park, the restaurant will embark on its new chapter simply as Khmai, a portmanteau of “Khmer,” the ethnicity and language of native Cambodians, and “me,” or mother. It’s a bold name meant to alert diners to the inextricable role of Sang’s mother, Sarom Sieng, in securing the legacy of traditional Cambodian cuisine. Now serving a new community, one that includes college students and professors (as well as hotel guests) Khmai will open with dinner and breakfast, with plans to launch brunch in August.
“We’re still going to be sticking with traditional flavors, but for brunch and breakfast, I can play a little more,” Sang says. “Mom will allow me to do that — we’re negotiating and coming to a middle ground. She doesn’t want me to Americanize our food, but she’s OK with this so far.”
Chef Mona Sang and her mother, Sarom Sieng, will soon get to cook in a much larger kitchen.Jack X. Li/Eater Chicago
Sang built a customer base with on church catering gigs, and rose to prominence after opening Khmai in 2022, accumulating accolades as a surprise smash-hit on Howard Street near the Evanston border. Mother and daughter were named co-winners of Eater Chicago’s Chefs of the Year award in 2022, and in 2023, the restaurant earned a semifinalist nod from the James Beard Foundation. For Khmai 2.0, a new generation is joining the mix — Sang’s daughter will begin her freshman year at Loyola in the fall and work at the restaurant in her spare time.
For Sang, the opening represents a fresh start after a contentious dynamic with her former landlord forced her to leave the original restaurant space. It’s also a new opportunity to share Cambodian culture and cuisine with even more diners and a chance to play, experiment, and partner with other Cambodian Chicagoans — to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.
“[Cambodians] are still not well known, a lot of people still don’t know about the food and who we are, or about the genocide,” Sang says. “My focus is still wanting to share my mom’s story because I think her story is important — what she went through, how she’s a huge survivor.”
The Cambodian genocide took place between 1975 to 1979 when the totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime murdered between 1.5 and 2 million people. As a survivor, Sieng endured countless horrors, including torture and the murder of her husband, Sang’s father. Sieng gave birth to Sang in a Thai refugee camp, before emigrating with her children to the U.S. as refugees in the early 1980s, first to New York City and later, to Chicago.
Khami’s traditional Cambodian cuisine will remain central at the new location, where dinnertime patrons can expect to find a rotating lineup of rich, complex staples seen at the original such as kuy reav tuk, a rice noodle soup with beef, onions, and crispy garlic. Sang will add a new date-night menu featuring interactive dishes like hot pot and smash-your-own papaya salad, complete with mortar and pestle, as well as a fresh lineup of dessert options such as fried and smashed baby bananas stuffed with banana coconut cream.
Diners should also expect doughnuts from suburban bakery Gurnee Donuts, owned by Sang’s friend Kevin Lee, a fellow first-generation Cambodian American whose parents also survived the genocide. “His mom and my mom are very similar, so we know what it’s like to be Cambodian kids whose parents have gone through trauma and want their kids to be the best of the best,” she says. “When I finally opened up the restaurant, he was one of the first people who was there, inspiring me to keep doing what I do best. He’s always been on my side.”
Cambodians are at the center of a grand doughnut tradition in the U.S., particularly in California. Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee, helped popularize the doughnut trade among Cambodian Americans and his story, immortalized in the 2020 documentary The Donut King, is a symbol of ingenuity that Sang says inspires her and many other Cambodian Americans.
With a new crop of hotel guests and Loyola customers at play, Sang plans to tune into the college crowd with affordable options like rice and beef skewers, as well as Sieng’s popular egg rolls, which she hopes will be a welcome relief for fast food-weary students. Early and mid-morning meals will become her playground for dishes like seasoned fried eggs with chicken and rice, rice porridge (akin to congee) with garnishes like blood sausage or crispy garlic, and pandan waffles with lemongrass chicken and ginger syrup.
The new Khmai will seat 70 inside in addition to an outdoor patio during warm weather. Onward, which opened in 2018, closed amid pandemic shutdown orders and was later the subject of a seemingly messy lawsuit. Its space, though, was immaculate, says Sang, who is happy to avoid expensive construction and simply add her own touches to the space: a black and gold color palette, Regency-style table settings (inspired, she confesses, by habit-forming Netflix confection Bridgerton), and Cambodian artwork from the original restaurant.
Sang is keenly aware of the risks involved in any restaurant operation, but has worked to set her anxieties aside in pursuit of her primary goal — to keep Sieng, now 80, engaged with the world and out from under the fog of trauma.
“I have to make sure she sees that we’re going to do this,” she says. “I want her to know that she deserves it. I don’t care about awards or any of that — I want her to know that we did this, we survived against all odds. If we survived the war, we can survive anything now.”
Khmai 2.0, 6580 N. Sheridan Road, Scheduled for an April opening.
Hi, I’m Dr. Harley (aka “Dog-tor” Harley). I’m the resident therapy dog here at Austin Pets Alive!, providing a much-needed listening ear, emotional support and calming presence to the humans working hard to get dogs like me adopted. My days are pretty jam-packed and I never know what they’ll bring. Sometimes my clients present with a classic case of separation anxiety, while other times I’m just a sounding board for their doggy drama. I get asked all the time what it’s like to be a four-legged therapist, so I’m pulling back the curtain to give you a glimpse into a day in the life of Dr. Harley. (All names have been changed to maintain client confidentiality.)
The central mystery in True Detective: Night Country seems easy when the credits roll on episode 1. It’s not that viewers already have the answer, but it at least feels like we can see all the puzzle pieces in front of us. That is, until episode 2. The second, even better episode of Night Country deepens the season’s central mystery with clever world-building and the most disgusting and disturbing ice sculpture on television.
If True Detective: Night Country is about anything so far, it’s about Ennis. More than a little town in Alaska with the nighttime that lasts days, Ennis is a place that’s simultaneously peaceful and terrifying. Rose’s (Fiona Shaw) description of the town to Navarro (Kali Reis) seems close to perfect: a place where the universe comes apart at the seams. It’s a description that takes the strangeness of this world head-on but hints at the softer side of the town, too: The dead find their way back in Ennis (sometimes because they want you to join them). But Ennis is also the kind of town that feels careful and handmade; the seams are wearing like a well-loved toy, not tearing like cheap stitching from a factory.
It’s a beautiful and layered description, but it’s also one that clues us in to what the show is doing. Things here are supernatural, sure; something’s clearly afoot. But that doesn’t mean that zombies roam Ennis or that a quick seance will clear this whole mess up. The dead in Ennis are like the ice: It’s always there, but sometimes it shifts a little, so you’ll notice it. And neither one is giving up its secrets easily.
Episode 2 opens by unveiling the season’s central mystery: a frozen pile of the corpses of the Tsalal scientists, an introduction that comes with some pitch-black comedy involving a grisly hand-breaking that you have to laugh at just to break the tension. True Detective has a grand history of gruesome crime scenes that are gorgeous in their own dark-hearted way, but this is easily the series’ masterpiece so far. The frozen corpsicle is as grotesque as it is beautiful. It’s disfigured and horrible, each body with its own bizarre self-inflicted wounds, equally inexplicable and begging for some detailed reveal that might show us how any of this could have happened. The whole thing, sitting in the middle of an ice rink, a triumph of set dressing and design, looks like it could contain an infinite number of secrets and details, if only you had the misfortune to look at it for too long.
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
One of the show’s most brilliant and subtle strokes, though, is one that comes outside of the newly forever-cursed ice rink when Danvers (Jodie Foster) interrupts a classroom to ask her former booty call what exactly it is that Tsalal does. For the deaths of these scientists to merit something as extreme and seemingly otherworldly as their frozen remains would indicate, it seems perfect that their investigation was into something as utopian as the description Danvers gets. A cure-all, hidden away under millions of years of ice. A perfectly solvable puzzle, if only the ice would reveal its mysteries. The explanation makes perfect sense to Danvers; it’s her new burden too, after all.
And fittingly, she too turns to science to sort out her frozen puzzle. She and Pete (Finn Bennett) trot out all the classics that scientists have used for the Dyatlov Pass incident: paradoxical undressing, wild animals, some kind of invisible but natural force like gas or radiation. Not a single one sticks.
But the show’s too smart to let not having an answer defeat Danvers. She’s stubborn enough to stick to the case, and fight for it, but she’s not too stubborn to admit she needs Navarro’s help to figure it out. And with mysterious tattoos of spirals older than the ice, and a trailer full of creepy dolls, the show finally lets its two main detectives team up.
Technically, True Detective: Night Country’s second episode is mostly just table setting, getting our detectives together, laying out the facts and their complications, the oddities and their halfhearted explanations. But the show plays all this setup like Ennis finally boiling over. It’s a town at the edge of both the spiritual and physical worlds, and now it’s breaking open, little by little, under the weight of poison water and mine protests. And True Detective: Night Country is clearly eager to show us the secrets under the fragile ice of Ennis.
Haas Motorsports has fired its former Formula 1 team principal Guenther Steiner. While this is a very sensible decision for Haas as a racing organization looking to succeed in F1 (and after the team finished in last place in the 2023 Constructor’s Cup, it’s probably coming a little late), it’s a devastating blow to fans of Netflix’s Drive to Survive.
While arguably one of least successful team principals in recent memory, Steiner was a godsend for the reality show producers at Box to Box. He’s an absolute character, a true weirdo in ways only European sports can produce. He’s brash, loud, opinionated, full of odd sayings and bizarre jokes, and he seemingly got along great with everyone. (Except, occasionally, his drivers.)
In other words, everything about him is pitch-perfect for a reality series, especially one trying to get off the ground. Even better, he was working for one of the lowest-ranked teams in the sport, so he had nothing to lose by allowing cameras into his paddock and behind the scenes for tons of access.
For most of Drive to Survive’s five seasons, Steiner has essentially remained the show’s main character. Sure, the show has way more access to the rest of the teams now than it did before, with even the top teams lining up to get their shot on camera, but there’s still no character quite like Guenther.
Steiner was also a fantastic entry point into the sport. A careful, eccentric explainer of racing, Steiner has a talent in his talking-head shorts for helping viewers learn more about racing without even realizing it. On top of that, his incredible Northern Italian dad energy provides a nice respite from the young-buck confidence of all of the drivers.
The only problem with all of this is that he wasn’t helping Haas score any points. He became a reality star, but that wasn’t translating to results on the track, which meant his days with Haas were numbered. Steiner will be replaced by Ayao Komatsu, who has been Haas’ trackside engineer since 2016, and has also appeared often on Drive to Survive.
The good news for Drive to Survive fans is that even though Guenther is one of a kind, there’s never a shortage of characters involved in Formula 1. We’ll just have to wait for two seasons from now to find out who, as the upcoming season — likely arriving sometime in February or March — will follow his final year as Haas’s team principal.
I know it’s not really a big feat but I’ve not gone a full week without drinking in about 2 months. I’m shooting to stay sober all of January, and maybe February too. So far, so good. Will see how it goes but I kinda wanted to tell someone because I’m proud of myself
Even small games can reveal delightful surprises years later. Now, roughly two years after its release, Unpacking fans are suddenly discovering a previously revealed secret mode after a TikTok video brought it back into the public eye. The mode is called Dark Star, and it basically forces players to beat the game by tossing objects on the floor instead of neatly putting them away like in the main mode.
In Unpacking’s standard mode, players complete levels by pulling objects out of a box and finding an appropriate spot to store them. If, for instance, you put toilet paper in the kitchen sink, the game will highlight the item with a red line and won’t let you complete the level. However, once you beat the game the regular way, you can enter Dark Star mode, where you beat each level by making sure every single item is placed incorrectly and highlighted in red. Once a player misplaces every single item, the game will award them with a darkened star and let them progress to the next level.
Developer Witch Beam teased Dark Star as a secret mode prior to the official reveal, then shared a video documenting it as part of an April Fools’ Day post in 2022. “So many people thought it was a fake feature for April Fools’ until they tried it for themselves,” Tim Dawson, a co-founder of Witch Beam and technical director of Unpacking,told Polygon via email.
Since that official reveal, some content creators have even streamed their Dark Star runs. Still, it’s clear that many fans didn’t know about the mode. After Dec. 22 Witch Beam TikTok went viral, fans shared reactions like, “THERE’S A DARK STAR MODE?!?!” and “I have 100% this game and I DIDNT KNOW THIS!? WHAAAAAT!?” Another wrote, “dude I beat this game like 10 times and i am just hearing abt this?!”
Dawson told Polygon that the secret mode lets players find new ways to experience the game’s puzzles. In the comments, several fans commented on how difficult Dark Star mode can actually be.
“I think what makes Dark Star so interesting is initially it feels like a gag,” Dawson said. “But after a few levels, it sets in how much work it is, and continuing can feel absurd, transgressive, or cathartic. But in the end, it’s just another way to think about items and how they relate to our lives and the spaces we live in, which is what the game is all about.”
Dawson also says that while the mode “started as a joke,” the developers now appreciate it as an extension of the game. “Because we decided not to extend Unpacking with DLC or a sequel, we often mention Dark Star mode when fans contact us asking if we’ll make more levels,” he said. “In many cases, it gives them another way to experience the game.”
Personally, I think Dark Star mode speaks to the ways our own media diets and specific bubbles of the internet can sometimes preserve a sense of surprise in a game. For Dawson, this kind of surprise can lend a sense of character to a game.
“I think secrets help give games their personality,” he said. “They’re the twinkle in the eye that suggests that these virtual worlds we spend time in might just be a bit bigger than you think. I love that we were able to come up with a good one for Unpacking.”
It just honestly seems like search engines are getting worse in general. Whether it’s the fact their primary focus is on ads, or maybe it’s the websites they link to just trying to show up, but it just seems like you can never actually find what you want when you search, just someone selling something.
For the past week, I’ve been watching Goodreads drama happen in what feels like slow motion. Debut author Cait Corrain admitted to fabricating at least six Goodreads user accounts, and leaving negative reviews (including one-star ratings) of other debut authors’ books — many of whom were authors of color. On Monday, her publisher dropped her book Crown of Starlight, and Corrain posted a mea culpa on X (formerly Twitter).
The coordinated efforts of fans and authors helped expose Corrain’s review bombing. Last week, Iron Widow author Xiran Jay Zhao tweeted a thread noting a series of one-star reviews on debut science fiction and fantasy authors’ Goodreads accounts, without naming any names. They also shared a 31-page document of unknown origin (which Polygon reviewed) that contained screenshots of accounts that added Crown of Starlight to a number of most-anticipated lists, and left one-star reviews on forthcoming books by Kamilah Cole, Frances White, Bethany Baptiste, Molly X. Chang, R.M. Virtues, K.M. Enright, and others.
This once again brings Goodreads’ moderation issues to the fore. When reached for comment, a Goodreads spokesperson sent Polygon a statement: “Goodreads takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously. We have clear reviews and community guidelines, and we remove reviews and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.” The company added, regarding Corrain’s one-star reviews, “The reviews in question have been removed.” Goodreads community guidelines state that members should not “misrepresent [their] identity or create accounts to harass other members” and that “artificially inflating or deflating a book’s ratings or reputation violates our rules.” But it doesn’t explain how those guidelines are enforced.
Goodreads also pointed Polygon to an Oct. 30 post about “authenticity of ratings and reviews,” which said the company “strengthened account verification to block potential spammers,” expanded its customer service team, and added more ways for members to report “problematic content.” The company addressed review bombing and “launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines.”
Ostensibly, these measures were put in place after several especially high-profile instances of review bombing on the platform this year. But these new tools did not prevent Corrain from review bombing authors in November and December. The guidelines, including the October one, ask users to “report” content that “breaks our rules,” seemingly shifting responsibility onto the user base. It’s past time for Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, to consider implementing more comprehensive in-house moderation — or at least more sophisticated internal tools — if not for the sake of its users, then for the sake of authors who are at the mercy of the platform.
Goodreads is extremely influential. There are over 150 million members on the platform, 7 million of whom participated in this year’s Reading Challenge. The platform also has few barriers against these sorts of review-bombing campaigns, as any user in good standing can post a review to the platform, including before the book has been published. Pre-publish reviews are part of the marketing cycle, and they are expressly allowed on Goodreads. Publishers encourage authors to get reviews on the Goodreads pages for their forthcoming books, including during the lead-up period to release. Readers can access advance copies of books through official channels like NetGalley, or by receiving an advance reader copy from the publisher, but there’s no way to know whether a reviewer on Goodreads has actually obtained an advance copy or not. (Though Goodreads review guidelines require readers to disclose if they received a free copy, not all users follow those rules — basically, you can post your review regardless.)
This is obviously not an issue that’s novel to Goodreads, but many other platforms require some form of verification before reviewing. Etsy allows users to review a product after they purchase it. Steam only allows users to write reviews of products in their Steam library, and includes “hours played” in the review. The closest comparison to Goodreads I can think of is Yelp, which allows people to leave reviews of restaurants and other establishments, and which also has to handle waves of negative reviews — often involving complaints about things that are entirely out of that business’s control. As far as fan-review platforms for entertainment go, there’s Letterboxd, a platform where users can track and review films. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the cultural chokehold of Rotten Tomatoes, a platform that aggregates review scores from professionally published critics (while it also aggregates audience scores, those are listed separately). Rotten Tomatoes has its own issues, but its system does mean reviews don’t tend to come from people who have not even consumed the media in question.
As a casual peruser on Goodreads, looking for a book to read, how do you know if a reviewer actually read the book? I guess the answer, at least right now, is: You can’t. And as fans have become more sophisticated and coordinated on the internet, it’s become even harder to take the platform’s reviews and ratings seriously. In July, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her forthcoming book The Snow Forest — which was set in Russia — after some 500 users, who had not read the book, left one-star reviews. Gilbert is much more established and better resourced than the debut authors Corrain targeted. She nonetheless made the decision to pull her book.
These debut authors didn’t have the same power or cachet, and it’s painful to imagine how Corrain’s negative reviews could have impacted those authors’ book sales — and subsequently their opportunity to write any more books — had Corrain’s actions gone unnoticed. Publishing is full of enough hurdles as it is, especially for authors of color, without this huge one so close to the finish line.
In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, players didn’t just play through another story set in Hyrule. The sequel to Breath of the Wild took the previous game’s sandbox elements several steps further, allowing players to use a new set of powers to construct machines, weapons, and tools using items in the world. By introducing this, Tears of the Kingdom encouraged players to be truly creative and push the limits of building in the game.
Fans responded to this new level of freedom by devising awe-inspiring creations and sharing them online. In the time since Nintendo released the game, fans have made nifty items like skateboards to intricate machines like a mechanized kaiju that looks like Godzilla. Given the game’s emphasis on creativity, Polygon asked Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma and game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi about the possibility that fans would ever get a Zelda game that purely focused on building their own creations, like Super Mario Maker. From the sounds of their answers, it seems unlikely Nintendo will release a Zelda game that’s purely about creating levels or dungeons.
“When we’re creating games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think it’s important that we don’t make creativity a requirement. Instead, we put things into the game that encourage people to be creative, and give them the opportunity to be creative, without forcing them to,” Aonuma told Polygon through an interpreter in an in-person interview.
Image: Nintendo/Nintendo EDP
In Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2, players can design their own Mario levels from scratch using an in-game editor. This has allowed players to create custom levels of all sorts in Mario. Players can make ultra-difficult levels that challenge the most seasoned Mario players or zany creations where a Mario level becomes an homage to Splatoon. No matter the approach, a huge aspect of the Super Mario Maker games is thatthey rely on player creativity.
Now, it’s no secret that the developers of Tears of the Kingdom were inspired by fan responses to Breath of the Wild. Developers saw players stretch the creative limits of Breath of the Wild, and they later created a game that doubled down on these sandbox elements. Given this, Zelda fans have long wondered if a version of Zelda that works like Mario Maker — where players could create or design dungeons or worlds — could ever come out. But when asked directly about a Mario Maker-style game for Zelda, Aonuma had an interesting answer about the nature of Zelda games and what they offer to players.
Image: Nintendo
“There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone,” Aonuma said. “I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play. If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative.”
Given Aonuma’s response, it seems unlikely that Zelda will ever get its Mario Maker equivalent. If we did get more creative elements, it seems they would have to be nestled into a larger game where players could proceed in multiple ways. So those holding out hope for a Zelda builder might be better off finding other games that currently offer similar options — which, luckily for us, already exist.
In 2023, one never knew when and where a musical might appear. The Marvels mixed in a musical sequence when Carol Danvers and Co. visit the planet Aladna, whose inhabitants converse solely in song and dance. Yellowjackets made a mini-musical inside the mind of Misty, who imagines the scene while suspended in a sensory deprivation tank. Doctor Who gave us goblins singing about eating a baby. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds committed to the bit best byairingafullmusicalepisode.
When musical interludes pop up in unexpected places, such as non-musical movies and shows, it makes sense that we’re surprised. But this year, even full-on movie musicals were liable to sneak up on us. There’s a reason musicals suddenly seemed so stealthy: Movie studios didn’t want us to see them coming. There’s a musical cover-up happening here.
Wonka comes out Friday, and by now, you probably know it’s a musical. (Though director Paul King calls it “more like a movie with songs.”) When the first trailer came out in July, though, there was little to no indication that the movie featured music at all.
In May, the first trailer for The Color Purple promised “a bold new take on the beloved classic,” but barely gave any indication of what that take is. (A grand total of two words were sung on screen.) The trailer notes that the movie is based on the 1982 novel by Alice Walker, but it doesn’t disclose—let alone boast—that it’s also adapted from the Tony-winning Broadway play (and stars some of the same actors).
Then, in November, the trailer for Mean Girls made millennials feel old by declaring, “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls.” In what way is it different from your mother’s Mean Girls? Well, most prominently, it’s a musical—except that this genre switch isn’t prominent at all. The trailer doesn’t let the secret slip.
The phenomenon also extends to animated movies, like Netflix’s Leo and Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, the Movie—both musicals, though one wouldn’t know it from the footage chosen to entice streaming audiences. Hollywood is still making musicals, but the industry doesn’t seem to want anyone to know. Why are so many musicals nowadays deep undercover, wearing drama disguises or comedy camouflage? Why must they be smuggled onto our screens?
“It’s a simple answer, studios believe people won’t go see a musical,” says Jeff Gritton, who edited trailers at Trailer Park, Inc. for 13 years. “I don’t know all their focus group and testing numbers, but at some point they decided people won’t see a musical.”
You don’t have to go back to 2016’s La La Land or 2017’s The Greatest Showman to find movies that put their musical feet forward in their teasersortrailers. But outside of Disney remakes, you do have to go back about that far to find many movies that did so and succeeded.
“A lot of musicals recently have underperformed, and pretty significantly,” says Josh Lynn, president of box office forecasting company Piedmont Media Research. “There were a slew of live-action musicals that came out after Hamilton, and for the most part they really disappointed relative to insider hopes.” Lynn mentions 2021’s Dear Evan Hansen, In the Heights, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and West Side Story (in addition, of course, to Cats, the2019movie–musicalbomb). CBRdubbed 2021 “the year of the movie musical,” but most of those musicals flopped.
The pandemic didn’t help the musicals that came out in theaters, but post-Hamilton musicals—even those that were well-received by critics—didn’t draw eyeballs on streaming services, either. “Over and over, musicals, whether big or not, just failed to resonate with customers,” streaming analyst Entertainment Strategy Guy wrote for The Ankler in early 2022. In addition to the aforementioned duds, he listed several others that failed to crack the streaming charts: Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom!, A Week Away, and Diana: The Musical, Prime Video’s Annette, and Come From Away and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, on Apple TV+ and Disney+, respectively. “The biggest hit of 2020 inspired some of the biggest misses of 2021,” ESG concluded about the movies that floundered in Hamilton’s wake.
What did all of the movies mentioned in the preceding paragraphs have in common, aside from being musicals? Everysingleoneofthemadmittedtheyweremusicalsupfront. Their trailers made the mistake of telling viewers what to expect.
Isn’t telling viewers what to expect the point of trailers? Maybe for the viewers, but from the studio’s perspective, accuracy and transparency are important only if they serve the larger objective. “Trailers are only made to get people to go see the movie—that’s it,” says one industry figure who has worked as a trailer production company’s editor, creative director, and senior executive and who requested anonymity because studios disapprove of talkative vendors. “It’s not to say, ‘We made this great piece of art.’ … Every time you see a piece of motion picture marketing, it is simply to get as many people out to the theaters or to watch it on streaming as humanly possible. … The goal of everything on our end is to get asses in the seats, and it’s by any means necessary.”
Studios and trailer houses go to great lengths to up their ass-in-seat counts. Kevin Goetz, the founder and CEO of entertainment research and content testing firm Screen Engine/ASI and the author of 2021 book Audience-ology: How Moviegoers Shape the Films We Love, says that trailers are the second-most-important driver of awareness of and interest in movies, after word of mouth. Thus, they’re subject to extensive testing designed to strip out any elements that might repel people and double down on qualities that could help set the hook—which has to happen quickly in a streaming setting, where the watcher isn’t a captive audience the way they would be in a theater.
Typically, the studio’s head of marketing has a strategy that’s arisen from research and guides the potential tone of the trailer. That exec contracts with a trailer house (or multiple trailer houses) to create various versions that play up or deemphasize certain aspects of the film (such as its fondness for song-and-dance routines). The resulting trailers get polished, tested, tweaked, and tailored to certain markets. “Obviously, you want to persuade, but by making the trailer more accessible for as many people as you can, you can exponentially raise the currency of that piece of advertising,” Goetz says.
That’s where non-musical trailers for musicals come in. “Musicals are embraced by many folks, but they’re also not embraced by many folks,” Goetz says. “And what are you trying to do in a trailer? It’s not the truth-in-advertising department, it’s the marketing department.” The trailer, he continues, is “a vehicle to give the essence without putting a stake in the ground and [categorizing] the movie too early for those who are turned off to musicals.”
In most cases, Goetz says, “There’s enough talking in the movie to tell you what the movie’s about without going into a song and making the movie feel like … ‘This is for them, but it’s not for me.’” After a musical’s cover is blown by hype or its premiere, follow-up or post-release trailers and teasers can embrace the film’s true nature. (Subsequent trailers for Wonka and The Color Purple have been slightlymoremusical.) But Goetz’s recommended course early on falls in line with how the studios seem to see things: “Keep to the traditional as long as you can, and then reveal the musical nature. … If I can eke out another $10 million by holding that message—not really tricking them, but not telling them—then I think that I’m going to do that.” The anonymous trailer creator concurs. “I think it’s smart marketing,” he says. “That would be my instinct, especially with something like The Color Purple or Wonka. I would try to obscure any musical theater.”
That may be painful for musical theater heads to hear, but provided the people who’d be less likely to see a movie if it were marketed as a musical outnumber the people who’d be more likely to see it, the math should favor keeping the musical quiet at first. After all, Goetz says, “There’ll be very few people who are actually going to walk out of the theater because, ‘God dammit, it was a musical and you didn’t tell me that.’” (In fact, he says, low-information moviegoers who make it to the theater without seeing through the ruse tend to be pleasantly surprised.)
Goetz agrees that the undercover musical is on the rise, and he says the studios know what they’re doing. “They’re not doing this in a vacuum. They’ve got research to support it,” he says. “I would imagine they cut a musical trailer or two, which just didn’t test nearly as well in terms of conversion. There’s always a reason for the decisions they make. They do very little that is against what the audience wants, because the stakes are just so high.”
You’re entitled to feel a little manipulated by the ears-only secrecy surrounding modern musicals, but you probably can’t take the marketers to court. Last year, two fans of Ana de Armas sued Universal over the actress’s absence from 2019 musical Yesterday, because she’d been cut out of the film after appearing in the trailer (which did feature musical performances, because, Beatles). A federal judge ruled that trailers are subject to false advertising laws, meaning studios must be careful about overpromising and underdelivering. But non-musical musical trailers are more like lies of omission. “If you had musical numbers that were not in the movie and you said, ‘I was going to see a musical and there was no music to be found,’ that’s a potential suit,” Goetz says. But in this case, “You could say, ‘Judge, we’re not trying to say it’s not a musical. It’s that the music is an added bonus. We didn’t want to give that away. We want people to be surprised.’”
However wise (and legally aboveboard) these trailer tactics may be, though, there are a few potential problems with excising the music from a musical. On the one hand, you save yourself some potential trouble getting trailer clearances for original compositions in the film. On the other hand, though, you risk losing what makes the movie special, as you might if you removed the jokes from a comedy trailer or the car chases and firefights from an action trailer. Travis Weir, a theatrical editor who predominantly cuts behind-the-scenes footage in his work with studios, points out that with a musical, “the songs are a huge part of the soul and character of the film. You’re not just cutting up a movie, or setting it to music in a novel way to imply something about the movie. It is the movie. So that’s an added challenge.”
Depending on the type of musical, doing away with the music may not leave a lot to work with. With a movie like 2012’s Les Misérables, the anonymous trailer producer says,it “would’ve been impossible to just do the dramatic parts, because it’s so singing intensive. … The films that are structured more like operas are incredibly difficult to cut around.” Granted, a movie like Les Mis is probably too famously a musical to fool anyone anyway. And most musicals include enough dialogue to give editors sufficient trailer material. “A trailer is two minutes and 20 seconds,” the longtime trailer maker says, “so getting two minutes and 20 seconds of drama out of a long [movie], it’s not as difficult as one would think.”
However, when the music is removed, there may be something slightly off about the actors’ line deliveries—an uncanny quality that comes from divorcing the dialogue from the showy, whimsical, heightened habitat of a musical. “It’s like a tonal phantom limb,” Weir says. “You can feel the itch that something else is supposed to be there.” The first trailer for Wonka was divisive and led to some sniping at Timothée Chalamet, arguably because the context of his performance wasn’t clear. But thebacklash doesn’t seem to have hurt the movie’s review scores or box officeexpectations.
There’s still some room on the small screen for unabashed musicals, like Schmigadoon! and the forthcoming Hazbin Hotel. For the time being, though, don’t count on being tipped off by a trailer to a musical movie unless it features a famous musical figure, à la Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Respect, Elvis, or Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Those movies make the music hard to hide—and anyone who wants to see them is probably into the tunes. Beyond biopics and Lady Gagavehicles, recognizable names are a must. “It’s easier to sell a preexisting IP to a studio (‘Look how many tickets people have bought to Mean Girls the musical over the past five years!’), even if the marketing people have to try to hide the fact that it’s a musical,” Lynn says. (Though when they hide that Mean Girls is a musical, they also obscure the reason for remaking it.)
As we’ve seen since 2021, the musical status quo can change quickly. Those studio execs must have thought they knew what they were doing when they gave green lights to so many musicals a few years ago, and look how well that worked out for them. (William Goldman’s maxim about the movie industry still applies.) Maybe Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls will make so much money that they’ll start another run on dancing and singing. All it takes is one Chicago, Mamma Mia!, or Pitch Perfect to create copycats.
Max Khosla, cofounder and creative director of trailer music company Trailer Bros, says, “The trends change every year and the marketing team at the studio makes many changes every year to better sell the movie. Every decision is profit-based.” Maybe the potential for profit will grow. Goetz laments that the musical “doesn’t feel like a theatrical genre anymore” and expresses sadness that the few remaining major musicals are facing such an uphill battle at the box office that they’re forced to hide who they are. But he offers some optimism: When “one does really well—let’s say when Wicked comes out and it really is huge—then maybe people will say, ‘Musicals are back.’” Maybe then, like poor Prince Herbert in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, musically inclined characters in trailers will once again get a chance to sing.
I advertised this cutting board on discord and it sold within two hours for 50. Because it’s engraved with a 15th century spell to cause someone to fall in love with you. The idea is you color some of jt with your blood, then make food for the person you want to fall for you
With just over 24 hours left before Rockstar Games was set to debut its first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer, a grainy video started circulating online: The GTA 6 trailer, but marked with a massive bitcoin watermark. About 30 minutes later Rockstar did the corporate equivalent of saying “Fuck it,” uploading the trailer and pointing to it in a terse post on X: “Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube.”
It’s unusual for a company like Rockstar to disregard its original, announced schedule and just post the thing, but it’s not the first time it’s happened. When The Last of Us Part 2’s PlayStation 5 remaster was leaked early on the PlayStation Store by data miners looking for new information, hours later, an official trailer popped up on YouTube, with several prominent Naughty Dog developers declaring that “leaks really suck.” (In Naughty Dog’s case, however, timing for The Last of Us Part 2’s remaster wasn’t announced, and it’s possible the YouTube release was its planned time.)
Typically, in the event of a leak, a company starts issuing takedown requests as quickly as possible — which Rockstar did, of course — and waits it out until the planned debut. (We’ve seen this plenty of times when Pokémon games leak early; Nintendo and The Pokémon Company try to take things down, but don’t acknowledge leaks head-on.) In the case of GTA 6, the early launch of the trailer hasn’t diluted the hype, with the GTA 6 trailer reaching more than 85 million views by Tuesday morning. It’s quickly gaining on Rockstar’s debut Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer, which was published on Nov. 2, 2011, and has more than 99 million views.
Image: Rockstar Studios/Rockstar Games
Several Rockstar employees have expressed their upset feelings about the leak: “This fucking sucks,” one developer posted to X. (The post, and the developer’s X account, have since been deleted.) The GTA 6 trailer wasn’t the first video game trailer to be leaked, and it definitely won’t be the last in an internet landscape where everyone from fans to brands is always fighting for eyeballs.
For better or worse, leaks have already become a part of GTA 6’s journey to its release — something that’s relatively on theme, as Rockstar’s upcoming game seemingly takes on the struggle for internet fame.
Grand Theft Auto is one of the video game industry’s most successful properties, which makes it a hot target for hackers and potential leaks. GTA 5 was released 10 years ago, and people have been salivating ever since at the prospect of the sixth entry in the series. Rockstar has been quiet about GTA 6 for most of the past 10 years; the studio didn’t acknowledge the game was in development until February 2022. Later that year, GTA 6 made history as Rockstar’s developers were subject to one of the largest leaks in modern video game history.
On Sept. 18, 2022, a hacker published more than 90 videos — roughly an hour’s worth of footage — from the in-development game. The leak was, and still is, unprecedented because of its sheer scope, the level of anticipation for the game in question, and because of how rare it is for fans to see huge parts of a AAA video game in a visibly unfinished state. The leaked footage depicted a GTA 6 that was clearly in development, with debug tools, blocked-out environments, and all.
Image: Rockstar Studios/Rockstar Games
The hacker claimed to have accessed Rockstar’s internal Slack, which is an application workplaces use to communicate and share files. A United Kingdom court found that a U.K.-based 18-year-old, Arion Kurtaj, was largely responsible for the hack. Kurtaj had been previously arrested for other hacking incidents performed in association with notorious group Lapsus$, and he was out on bail when he went after Rockstar, Uber, and Revolut. Kurtaj’s hack of Rockstar was the last one he managed before he was caught again in a Travelodge hotel that he had been put up in following concerns for his safety (he was previously doxxed by “rival hackers,” according to the BBC). Kurtaj and a second 17-year-old hacker were found guilty in August. The BBC reported that the prosecution’s lead barrister on the case, Kevin Barry, said the hackers were motivated by “notoriety,” “financial gain,” and “amusement.”
The damage had been done; many fans couldn’t resist the peek behind the curtain before the real show began. The hourlong clips in the leak gave eager GTA 6 fans a lot of material to work through, and by September of this year, the community had put together a 60-page document outlining every single detail from the leak.
Rockstar announced in November that it would post a trailer in December, news that was first reported by Bloomberg and quickly confirmed by Rockstar. Last week, Rockstar finally announced a date for the trailer: Dec. 5. In the lead-up to the trailer drop date, several quick videos were uploaded to TikTok purporting to show parts of the GTA 6 Vice City map; the video clips, which quickly spread, appeared to be recordings of a computer screen. The source and credibility of these uploads remains unconfirmed, but they do seem to match the cityscapes we’ve now seen in the legitimate trailer. Somewhere along the way, rumors started circulating that the leak came from a Rockstar employee’s son, but Polygon is unable to verify those claims. It’s impossible to tell, of course, whether the TikTok leaks came from the same source as Dec. 4’s trailer leak.
GTA 6’s legacy of leaks not only has an impact on how the community sees the game, but it’s something that affects developers, too. Rockstar is famously secretive — or perhaps notoriously so — and leaks are sometimes considered a rare look behind the curtain for fans, or even a triumph for transparency. Unfortunately, though, leaks can often have the opposite effect. Speaking to Wired in 2022, a AAA developer said leaking can tighten things up even more, making the industry more opaque — even within studios themselves. Sometimes, a “trust vacuum” forms between departments as studios investigate leaks internally, Wired reported. The player experience will rarely, if ever, be significantly altered by a leaked trailer or gameplay video, but the same can’t be said for the people making a leaked game.
While age is just a number, senior dogs are often overlooked for adoption due to misconceptions about what having an older dog means. November is Senior Pet Month and we’re working to shine the golden spot light on these amazing animals by breaking down some common senior pet misconceptions! Seniors like Abby want you to know that entering their golden years means these pups at heart deserve more than ever to spend their days in a loving home. In return, they promise to shower their human companions with affection and live each day to its fullest potential.
Misconception #1: Old Dogs Are No Longer Energetic
One of the most prevalent misconceptions about older dogs is that they become lethargic and lose their energy as they age. While it’s true that older dogs may not have the same boundless energy as puppies, they can still be quite active and enjoy physical activities. In fact, regular exercise is essential for maintaining their physical and mental health. Adjusting the type and intensity of exercise to match their age and health status is crucial. Consult with your veterinarian to develop a suitable exercise routine for your senior dog.
Misconception #2: You Can’t Teach Old Dogs New Tricks
The old adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” couldn’t be further from the truth. Older dogs are just as capable of learning new things as their younger counterparts. While it may take a bit more time and patience, training an older dog can be a rewarding experience. In fact, older dogs often come with the advantage of being calmer and having better attention spans, making them more receptive to training.
Misconception #3: Older Dogs Are Not Suitable for Adoption
Many people believe that older dogs are not ideal candidates for adoption and that puppies or younger dogs are better options. However, older dogs can make fantastic pets. They often come already house-trained and have established personalities, making it easier to find a dog whose temperament matches your lifestyle. Adopting an older dog can also be incredibly rewarding, as you provide a loving home for a dog in its golden years.
Misconception #4: Older Dogs Don’t Need Social Interaction
Older dogs, just like their younger counterparts, benefit from social interaction and mental stimulation. Isolation can lead to anxiety and depression in older dogs, so it’s important to provide opportunities for socialization and playtime. Consider arranging playdates with other dogs, taking leisurely walks in the park, or engaging in interactive games to keep your senior dog’s mind and body active.
Older dogs are often misunderstood and over-looked at shelters due to misconceptions about their behavior and needs. It’s important to recognize that older dogs can lead happy, fulfilling lives with the right care and attention. By dispelling these misconceptions, we hope more potential adopters will consider making a senior dog part of their family. APA! has successfully placed many wonderful seniors in foster or adoptive homes where they continue to thrive and bring joy to their new family.
context: cat is put in a bad cause its trying its best to protect his human, some ******* throw him into a river, the anger he feels is so strong that it makes him worthy of a red ring, his human gets killed so he hunts down the ******* that did it and kills them all
A couple of significant things happened in the world of online gaming over the first weekend of November. At its BlizzCon convention in California, Blizzard devoted quite a lot of time to World of Warcraft Classic — the nostalgic, retro version of its 19-year-old massively multiplayer game — and revealed surprisingly ambitious plans for Classic’s future. At the same time, Fortnite’s servers were melting under the load of its biggest day ever, which was all down to the launch of Fortnite OG, a special season bringing back the game’s original map and 2018 gameplay.
All of a sudden, in the proudly impermanent world of online gaming — where change is always good, and if it’s not, never mind, because here comes more change — winding back the clock is big business. It’s a kind of paradox: Because online games are always evolving, a sense of scarcity and intense nostalgia forms around the way they used to be. If you can find a way to bring that feeling back, especially for an audience that’s getting jaded, then you’re on to something.
Blizzard initially seemed reluctant to get on board with a growing movement in WoW’s community that wanted to go back to the way things were in 2004-2005. It squashed unofficial “vanilla” servers and prevaricated over creating an official alternative for years. In a way, it’s understandable: If you have spent many years of effort on (in your eyes) modernizing and improving your game, why would you want to indulge this rose-tinted exercise? Isn’t World of Warcraft just better now?
Of course, that’s a value judgment — but what’s undeniable is that WoW is now extremely different from how it used to be. And that’s exactly what makes Classic a viable and interesting, if slightly old-fashioned, alternative. After Classic arrived in 2019, included in a standard WoW subscription, it became a roaring success, partly because of the strong contrast between it and the two unloved expansions (Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands) it launched between.
But what’s really fascinating about Classic is where Blizzard is taking it next — because Classic is an online game, and no online game can stand still, even a throwback. It began as a relatively faithful version of the original MMO with smart tweaks: It moved through content patches at an accelerated rate, while locking to a single iteration of game design and balance. Then it bifurcated, with some servers moving forward through classic expansions, while others stayed in the “vanilla” era. This year, it acquired a third track, something completely new that WoW had never had before: a permadeath Hardcore mode, which turned out to be a game-reviving innovation that was quite brilliant in its simplicity.
From its showing at BlizzCon, Blizzard is doubling down on morphing WoW Classic into its own game. The expansion servers are moving on to Cataclysm, which is probably the point at which “classic” becomes a misnomer: Whatever your feelings about this divisive expansion, its sweeping rewrite of the “old world” questing experience is the point at which original WoW died, and is still represented in the game today. Blizzard is going even further than it has before in tweaking and fixing this expansion for Classic, accelerating leveling, adding quality-of-life features, and throwing in new dungeon difficulties and loot.
World of Wacraft Classic’s Season of Discovery seeds the well-explored world of Azeroth with secrets.Image: Blizzard Entertainment
But that isn’t even the headline. Blizzard — drawing inspiration from sister series Diablo, as it did for the Hardcore mode — is also introducing a fourth track to the WoW Classic servers that seasonally remixes the original “vanilla” game. Season of Discovery, which launches on Nov. 30, seeds entirely new content across the original world of Azeroth in the form of Discoveries, which producer Josh Greenfield said at BlizzCon were a way to disrupt the “solved nature” of original WoW and restore a “feeling of adventure and exploration.” It also offers a Rune Engraving system that endows classes with entirely new abilities, even allowing them to switch archetypes (you’ll be able to create a tank Warlock or a healer Mage, to name a couple).
The game is furthermore being broken up into level-banded phases — the initial level cap will be only 25 — and interpolated with all-new endgames, one for each phase. The first of these reworks the classic leveling dungeon Blackfathom Deeps as a 10-player raid, but Blizzard is also teasing adding unfinished or cut content, and even all-new dungeons, to Season of Discovery. It’s not just a new way to think about classic WoW — it’s a new approach to structuring MMOs, borrowing liberally from across the online gaming landscape. It’s pretty exciting.
That Blizzard is going to all this effort shows that WoW Classic is working both for the business and for the WoW community. It also demonstrates that for an online gaming nostalgia mode to succeed in the long term, it needs to evolve away from being an emulation or restoration of a bygone experience, and become a (sort of) fresh game in its own right. (Or, in Classic’s case, four games.)
Tilted Towers has returned in Fortnite OG.Image: Epic Games
Currently, Epic has no plans to keep Fortnite OG going past its current monthlong season, which sprints through six seasons of the game’s Chapter 1 in a matter of weeks instead of months. The branding clearly allows for OG to return and revisit later chapters, but given the enormous surge in interest, Epic would be foolish not to be considering ways to keep some of these new or returning players in the fold permanently.
It’s true that WoW and Fortnite are very different games with, crucially, different business models. Splitting the game’s audience might be more of a worry for Epic than it is for Blizzard, which is presumably happy as long as all those players stay within the one subscription-paying bucket. But WoW has proven that a big online game — especially one with a history — can support a family of sub-communities enjoying different flavors of the same game. Indeed, that might be the healthiest way forward for a game of that sort, certainly one approaching its 20th anniversary.
More importantly, perhaps, what WoW Classic and Fortnite OGdemonstrate is that the history of online games doesn’t have to be consigned to the scrapheap of memory. There’s a genuine hunger from players to turn back the clock, which, when met by an inventive studio that understands what was special about what it created but is willing to take some risks with it, can create something vibrant and sustainable in the long term — a kind of multiverse of paths not taken for your favorite old multiplayer games. What’s next, Vault of Glass in modern Destiny 2? Sign me up.
I got out of prison 4 months ago. I’ve been living with my grandma (God bless her) so I’ve been able to save up some money and this is the first car I’ve ever bought! Just wanted to say to y’all to keep your heads up and trust that your effort will pay off in the end. I was riding my bike 15 miles a day to and from work and I was able to pay cash for this car. It was $1200 to get my license reinstated after a federal drug indictment and the car was $3800 after taxes. Don’t ever give up! Don’t ever lose hope!
After nearly three years in development, Outerloop Games and Annapurna Interactive’s Thirsty Suitors was released on Nov. 2. From the beginning, the Outerloop Games team knew a few things: They wanted to make a game about relationships, and they wanted it to reflect the lived experience of its developers in telling an immigrant story. So much of the game was built out from there to create the wholly unique, genre-bending Thirsty Suitors — a game that blends its story up with cooking games, turn-based battles, and skateboarding.
What you get is a video game that goes beyond its individual labels. In the lead-up to Thirsty Suitors’ Nov. 2 release date, Polygon spoke to Outerloop Games co-founder/Thirsty Suitors director Chandana Ekanayake and narrative designer Meghna Jayanth about the complex, “more is more” game that explores both trauma and joy while player-character Jala kickflips her way through her hometown.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
[Ed. note: This story has been edited for length and clarity.]
Polygon: Thirsty Suitors is so many different things — turn-based fighting, cooking, romance. It’s an immigrant story, a skateboarding game. How did you pull all these elements together?
Chandana Ekanayake: Where do I start? It starts with the theme and the stories we wanted to tell, and everything else stemmed from there. We wanted to do an immigrant story, because a lot of the folks on the team are — it’s a fully remote team made a lot of immigrants.
That’s where we started. And then we knew we wanted to do a game about relationships. The battle system came out of that, like, how do we balance this argument personified into this battle, plus the writing, the dialogue back-and-forth. So from that, the story came through, throughout just a lot of iteration. Then we added the cooking — it was always gonna be a big part of it, because culturally it’s significant to be able to talk through things while cooking. And then skating was just something that made sense after — I don’t know, it just came about.
Meghna Jayanth: I think skating began as a loading screen. There’s so much creativity on the team; it was really just a loading screen that people loved. And then we built it. Working as the narrative designer, week after week, I would come back and be like, Oh, it’s been two weeks. I haven’t checked in on this. Oh, we’re making a minigame. There’s a little bit of exuberance and creativity on the team.
I think we pulled all of that in. Eka loves to call this a “baby Yakuza,” which I really love as a description. There’s really a sense of joyful abundance, like we’re presenting you with all of these delightful things to do, but hopefully it has some focus as well.
With regard to skateboarding, it comes into the story as well. It’s the same with cooking. Did those parts grow throughout production? Or was it intended to be like that from the start?
Ekanayake: It grew through production, but we also knew the narrative was the focus of the game. We wanted all these — and this is where the “baby Yakuza” comparison is — disparate game mechanics to weave in and out through the narrative. That came through iteration.
The skate park became how Jala and Tyler bond, by doing her a bunch of these favors and trying to figure out what’s going on in the skate park. Cooking was also a way to bond with your parents and figure things out, because Jala hadn’t talked to them in years. You probably noticed that the stuff you cook at home, while there are great emotional beats, it also means you can use in battle too, as items.
Jayanth: A lot of it comes down to the fact that we were able to work on this for about three years. We had an opportunity to figure out what the heart of the story was, what those themes were, and then play around with the narrative and mechanics and really iterate and have the time for that to develop. Big story ideas could change until eight, nine months before we shipped. We edited and significantly changed almost all the content in the game just before we went into voice recording. It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to develop ideas in that way, which you don’t often get given the production cycles of the games industry.
Ekanayake: That was intentional because we knew the game was going to be so different. We needed time to figure it out. There’s 19 actors for 21 speaking characters in the game. Once we cast, Meghna was like, Oh, I’m going to write to this actor now because of how they deliver the lines. That was unexpected, different from what we actually envisioned on paper. It was a really fun process.
Jayanth: We actually did a lot of rewriting on the fly in the sessions, too. It’s nice to be in those, because there’s a lot of very specific cultural context. Even the actors, we were really deliberate about making sure the actors matched the backgrounds of our characters. Even within that, there’s so much you could pick from someone. I’m from Bengaluru down south, and you could go down the street and meet somebody with a completely different sort of context.
We did seven weeks of VO straight. We had a brief break in the middle so we could go outside.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
Ekanayake: It’s fully remote, right? The team is spread across seven cities, four continents. We have folks in LA in the studio, folks in Vancouver and New York and Toronto. It was a really fun process. The biggest dramatic thing was our lead, who played Jala, Farah Merani, was very pregnant. It was a running clock to finish. She has, like, a third of the lines in the whole game. So her bag was packed in LA at the studio, ready to go. We finished and a week later she gave birth. It was that close
Jayanth: We wrapped on a Thursday or Friday, and the following Tuesday, she was giving birth, which is amazing. We did have a little bit of a backup plan, which I’m so glad we didn’t have to institute, where maybe Aruni [a fantasy version of Jala’s sister, who is Jala’s inner voice] takes over Jala if we don’t get through those lines.
Since we’re talking about production, let’s talk about what it was like for you to work on this game. You’ve both talked about how having a good, healthy production is important — to have people who are taken care of and treated well. Why is that important to you?
Ekanayake: Mostly because we’ve had the opposite experience. This is my 25th year in games. I’ve worked on a lot of projects — bigger teams, smaller teams.
Part of starting the studio fully remote six, almost seven, years ago was part of that, to be able to work-life balance a little better. We’re made up of a third brand-new folks who’ve never worked on games, a third somewhere in between, and then the rest are olds, like myself. We wanted to have a variety of experience and also get folks that have never worked on games some experience as well, because I think that’s important.
That’s the great thing we can do remotely; people don’t have to move their whole lives for a job. We finished the game in almost three and a half years. The last two and half years have been fully four days a week. We started this during the pandemic, so people are going through all sorts of things, and we didn’t want the work to be another thing that was weighing on folks, while going through some hard times and trying to make the schedule work. The great thing is we control how big the game is. There’s no need to make it a certain size, which allowed us to have a flexible schedule. So people aren’t burnt out at the end of it.
Jayanth: I’m not a manager, but it’s just been really wonderful to work with a team where all these production processes really work. We hit all of our internal deadlines, which is wild to me. I’m not sure that has ever happened.
Ekanayake: We did extend the game a little bit just to try to figure out a launch window, which is so hard this year.
Jayanth: We kind of built this game a little bit as a sense of refuge for us, particularly for marginalized folks and queer folks. It felt really important that we were doing that during the pandemic as well. Getting to work on this colorful, joyful world was a really nice escape for I think a lot of us on the team from what was going on outside. I think it’s really important to be able to do that while not burning yourself out. I do think that it’s a really important model in the industry, that there are alternative ways that we can do these things. We don’t want to be making these supposedly joyful games but burning people out and destroying them in the back end. At the end of the day, it is just a video game. I know we’re out here to sell this game and we want people to play it, and we’re really proud of it, but it is just a video game at the end of the day. And I think keeping that perspective is super important.
Meghna, I know you’ve spoken a lot about capitalism and colonialism in games. Does Thirsty Suitors subvert that tendency of the games industry? It sounds like that influence goes beyond the game, but in studio practices as well. But in-game, all of the different layers of community building really stood out to me.
Jayanth: What we really wanted to do with it was just kind of create a bit of a balance. I think you want a certain amount of familiarity and familiar mechanics, especially when you’re innovating on content and themes. I talked about this at my talk at NYU just last week, as well. In some ways, I feel like maybe the most radical thing that we are doing here is allowing the protagonist to inhabit this queer brown woman joyfully. It’s a sad thing that that’s still deeply unusual in the industry, but I do think that really pushes back against the narrative of who’s playing games, and also whose humanity is interesting to play, and what kind of fantasies — to open up the space for the different kinds of power fantasies that we can explore in games.
I keep joking with my friends, whenever I’m explaining this to non-gamers, I’m like, “All right, the power fantasy of Thirsty Suitors is you get to speak up to your parents, tell them how you feel, and they listen and learn and grow. And the final boss is your maternal grandmother!” It’s about the fantasy of breaking cycles of generational trauma, which is very real, very human. And, yes, they’re very specific, but I think these are all really universal ideas.
One of the things that actually we probably haven’t talked about that much that we did want to include is that this game was sort of set in the ’90s and Jala is in her mid-20s. She has a bit of a millennial vibe, because, I guess, we are — but we really wanted to have that idea of, she’s speaking up to her parents and the older generation, but also kind of being challenged on some of her bullshit by the kids at the skate park, who are way more radical in a way. Personally, I think Jala is a lot less radical than I am, which is fine, too. With the skate park, we get to challenge some of those narratives as well. Hopefully it feels more like being in conversation rather than preaching to anyone. It’s that feeling of being challenged and having accountability, and that being OK, and learning and growing and healing. All of which I think are wonderful things for us to model right now in the world.
Ekanayake: Yeah, and also, it’s not just about Black and brown trauma, right? There’s the joys of the experience and the fantasies of it too. That’s pretty radical too, I think, for most game stories that come out these days. That was definitely intentional.
I’m really into saying goodnight to Jala’s dad every night. It’s so sweet. I have been looking forward to Jala going home, and I wonder what they’re going to watch.
Jayanth: I’m going to reveal a little secret. Some of the things you watch are actually Eka’s kids’ basketball games that he taped. It adds an extra layer of cuteness.
Ekanayake: I think we have the history of Washington wines as read by one of the folks that helped us on VO. And then we have the history of trains.
Jayanth: I think there’s a Cold War documentary, because all dads are obsessed with the Cold War.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
I got that one last night, and I was like, Yep, yep.
Jayanth: Getting to put this gentle brown dad in the game was just so lovely for us. And I think it was actually quite late in the process that we really found that cycle of, like, cooking in the morning, going to the skate park, to wandering downtown and then coming back home. That kind of cycle that started feeling really good for us, where players have some idea of what to expect — and another way I think that we are respectful of players is the game is about six to nine hours in total, which I love as a length. And also, the chapters are 40-minute-to-an-hour chunks, which is, I think, a respectful amount of time in someone’s day. There’s a really deliberate effort to put a whole narrative arc in that so that it feels satisfying without demanding too much of your time.
Ekanayake: Yeah, we just want a little bit of your time. Not all of it.
The game is also very funny, but has an earnest emotional core with Jala’s family and culture. How do you pull that off?
Ekanayake: Being honest with ourselves, and taking that stuff seriously — just trying to find the truth in it and play with it, but also, we’re sincere about it.
Jayanth: All of us care. In some ways, Nicole, it’s a little bit terrifying. It does feel really exposing. We’re so much less interested in ironic distance and with appearing cool. We all just really wanted to make something really human. There’s elements of writing and story there. But I also think it’s completely the animation, the light, everything, to the way that camera angles are framed. And of course the voice acting as well, which just adds just a huge layer of humanity back in there. But I hope it feels a little bit like real life. And hopefully there’s enough humor in there that we can pull off a few of the the sincere moments. I won’t deny that I would be extremely delighted if we made people cry. [laughs]
Ekanayake: We found that through the beginning of the project. The first thing we built was the Sergio battle. And tonally, it was a lot meaner. Jala was a lot meaner to Sergio.
Jayanth: Sergio was actually fully toxically masculine in what I consider to be an unacceptable way. But people liked him. [laughs]
Ekanayake: People really liked him and felt bad for him. So Meghna reworked the dialogue, and that’s where we really found the tone for the game.
Jayanth: That’s something that was really great that we got a chance to respond to. In doing that playtesting early, we found that, Oh, actually, people want much more to make friends with this person. Each of these suitors, we’re actually spending a significant amount of time in the game with them. People want to love them. And so instead of kind of trying to push against that, we just incorporated that into our storytelling.
Initially, we had a design where you could choose to make up with the characters, or you could choose to basically be enemies as well, or it could be based on narrative choices. But I think as we went on, the game just turned into one about reconciliation and healing. And so none of the characters you meet are on unremittingly evil in any way. They’re certainly flawed, and I like some of them more than others, but they’re all just human beings attempting to make sense of life, basically.
Ekanayake: Meghna and I are both are older game developers, and I think the later we get into our career and projects, especially on this one, we let the game tell us what it wants to be through the course of development. There’s this risky and scary but really exciting part of it where it’s just like, We think we know what we’re gonna build, but leave enough room for some magic to happen and for the game to figure itself out. That really happened on this project. It doesn’t always happen, but I think being open to it really worked out for us on this project.
Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive
I want to talk a little about music too. It feels like 1990s hip-hop with South Asian influence. What was your approach to creating music that matched the vibe of Thirsty Suitors?
Ekanayake: For the exes battles, we were kind of thinking about ’90s music videos, when music videos were a big deal. We’re looking at the theatrical, over-the-top aspect of the spaces and those videos and trying to find a piece of music to match each of the characters and themes. So like everything else, just lots of time and iteration.
Jayanth: I love the vocals in it, which are just so beautiful. It was wonderful for us to have some Tamil in the vocals. I would say that’s really unusual in games, but this year we’ve come out alongside Venba.
You can really see there’s a lot of ’90s hip-hop meets anime meets South Asia. It’s a “more is more” aesthetic.
Ekanayake: Because of the fantastical spaces and the surreal nature of some of the battles, we were able to really push the music to fit those colors and themes, too.
Jayanth: I’ve been secretly sneaking our playlist onto my party playlist and everybody’s like, Oh, that’s really good. Hopefully you see some of that joy. And that’s what it’s been like working on this. Every single person has just put so much love into it. Every single day, when [Thirsty Suitors composer Ramsey Kharroubi] drops a track or [animator Aung Zaw Oo] does a new piece of animation, or a new piece of writing goes in, it just reignites the inspiration for each one of us.
Ekanayake: It’s a 15-person team, so everyone has something significant that they can contribute at this scale. Everyone can point to something in the game and go, “I did that.” That’s what I like about this scale we’re at, too.
Stella has started walking sideways, no bladder control and cant stand up straight anymore. Im worried its a brain tumor and that she doesnt have very long to live. Please, if praying is your thing, say something for either a recovery or a short easy passing. She was a blind rescue who was a torpedo for peoples legs and knocked many a man down but we love her very much and I will miss her when her time does come…
We all do it. But we all go about keeping it sanitary in different ways. Humans use flushing toilets, cats keep it classy and bury it or use a litter box. And dogs? Well. Dogs need their mamas and dads to help them out. That’s right. We’re talking about poop.
When it comes to keeping our environment clean and healthy, dog “paw”rents have a responsibility to do a simple act: scoop the poop.
It isn’t glamorous and certainly isn’t fun. But it takes just a few seconds to pick up your dog’s poo and is so important to keeping our environment safe. Dog doo doo is not the same as cow manure, as many may think. It doesn’t offer healthy growth to the grass and in fact, can be pretty damaging. Beyond damaging the grass, letting dog poop sit means that bacteria is seeping into our waterways, causing illness like giardia!
Sure, it’s smelly to deal with and sometimes the consistency can be pretty gross to handle, but we’d rather have a clean environment and healthy waters, so scooping the poop is a small price to pay!
We can #scoopthepoop a few different ways:
The hand-in-bag method: open poop bag, place hand inside, using it like a glove. Pick up that poop without actually coming in contact, then turn the bag inside out as you pull your hand out, safely containing the poop! Find a trash can to throw the bag away — you’re done!
Pooper Scooper device: maybe it’s a shovel, maybe it’s a fancy contraption designed specifically for this chore — whatever you use to get the job done!
Thousands of dogs call Austin home — we wouldn’t be one of the best cities in the nation without them, so let’s make sure that we keep our community sparkling by doing the dirty job of scooping the poop!
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