When Mike Schalau first launched Is/Was Brewing five years ago, a Redditor shared an image of the poster for the brewery’s release party with the note: “It’s a new project focusing on saison, so they’ll be making hazy IPAs in two weeks.”
The demand for hazies has since cooled, but the Redditor’s remark still resonates with Schallau.
“I’m not a petty person, but I saw that and I said to myself ‘hold my saison,’” he says.
Is/Was still hasn’t released anything but saisons, and drinkers can try six different versions of the French/Belgian style at their new taproom at 5121 N. Ravenwood Avenue., which opened in August. Schallau, who lives in Ravenswood and has been contract brewing from Begyle Brewing, says he’d been eyeing the Malt Row building since Urban Brew Labs closed in 2022.
The taproom is simply decorated with a colorful board on the exposed brick wall showing off the draft list. There are plenty of outlets in the curving booths to welcome locals who want to use the place for remote work along with a scattering of small tables and seats at the bar. A secondary space with room for 50 more is currently being used for overflow seating but Schallau is considering adding Skeeball or other fun activities.
Delicate, yeast-driven saisons were Schallau’s favorite style when he first started getting into beer while working at West Lakeview Liquors, a shop at Addison and Leavitt that specializes in imported brews. But when Schallau joined Pipeworks Brewing Company, he devoted himself to learning and drinking their preferred styles — hoppy IPAs with high ABV.
“As I went from an intern there to running all daily operations and overseeing recipe development, I’d kind of fallen out of love with making beer,” Schallau says. “I was kind of lost. Then I had a saison, La Vermontois, a collaboration between Belgian brewery Blaugies and Hill Farmstead in Vermont and I was like, ‘Ohh, I forgot. This is what I really fell in love with.’”
He began experimenting with what would become his flagship, Will Be, seeking to fill a void in the Chicago market while appealing to evolving tastes. Most of Is/Was’ beers are about 3.2 percent ABVs, topping out with a rare 6 or 6.5 percent.
“I think that a lot of craft beer drinkers are getting a little older and their palates are developing in a different way than when they wanted to drink super hoppy beers and really acidic kettle sours,” Schallau says. “Saison has these flavors that are really complex if you want to dive into what’s going on in the beer, or you can kind of crush a couple of them and they’ll be super satisfying and refreshing.”
The taproom shows off the style’s versatility by pouring Is/Was’ Will Be, Wisp smoked saison, and Saison Effyrayant — which is conditioned with fresh sage leaves — along with rotating pours developed in collaboration with other breweries including Revolution Brewing. Schalau plans to start making some other styles once his new production brewery is up and running in about a month. Until then, there’s a selection of six guest drafts including Goldfinger Brewing Company’s flagship lager and Hop Butcher For The World’s Snorkel Squad double IPA.
Barry Brecheisen/Eater Chicago
“Instead of making a mediocre version (of a style), we’d rather get the best version from our world-class brewery friends,” Schallau said. “We want people who don’t like saison to have a good time.”
To that end, the brewery also serves Shacksbury Cider, Dark Matter nitro coffee, and a blackberry shrub prepared with Mick Klug Farms berries and housemade malt vinegar. Schalau would like to see the brewery become a third space for the neighborhood and while he doesn’t have a kitchen, he’s already hosted a popup with Motorshucker and arranged a 15% percent discount for customers who want to pick up a Detroit-style pie from Fat Chris’s Pizza and Such around the corner. He’s also planning on hosting makers markets to show off works made by his employees and artists the brewery works with.
Schallau says he’s been overwhelmed with the response to the opening, which brought lines out the door for nearly five hours.
“I spent most of the last five years (brewing beer) in a 600-square-foot room without windows and most of that time I was alone, wondering if anyone was drinking it or if anyone even really cared about this thing that I cared very deeply about,” he said. “It was a nice way to kind of physically manifest the fact that people had been paying attention. It was pretty emotional.”
Is/Was Brewing, 5121 N. Ravenswood Ave., open noon to 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday; noon to midnight on Friday and Saturday
Hirschpfeffer is essentially deer meat that’s been soaked in a marinade of red wine, vinegar, vegetables and spices to make it tender and less gamey. That same marinade is then used for the sauce, which is thickened with butter, flour and a bit of cocoa.
There’s a video I return to often. Posted just over 10 years ago by an essentially defunct blog called Houston Hip-Hop Fix, it shows Rich Homie Quan in a blue Argentina soccer kit and at least five necklaces. Quan and the interviewer are bathed off and on in the strobing red light of a cop car. There’s one microphone, so Quan and the host step on one another’s thoughts, deferring politely and shrugging apologies. The rapper runs through the sort of light mythmaking that marks all these interviews: Yes, the debut album is coming; no, no more free mixtapes; yes, music runs through my veins; no, I never touch pen to paper.
About 90 seconds into the clip, Quan starts talking about his relationship with Young Thug. He says they have unique chemistry in the studio, more boilerplate stuff. But a minute later––after a clumsy jump cut in the video—Quan says that he and Thug are going to release an EP. Most definitely, the interviewer says. Any plans on when that’s gonna drop? “Before the year’s out,” Quan replies. The interviewer asks whether he’d be willing to reveal the title. Quan declines, but he strokes his goatee, looks for a second into the camera––something he hasn’t done to this point––and raps his hand on the interviewer’s forearm for emphasis. “I can tell you this,” he says. “The EP me and Thug [are going to] drop? The hardest duo since Outkast.” The interviewer’s eyes widen. He starts to push back (“Now that’s—”), but Quan cuts him off. “I’m not being funny.” He presses. “I’m not putting too much on it. Hardest duo since Outkast.”
Quan, who passed away Thursday, one month before his 34th birthday, was always doing this: cocooning the audacious within a thick layer of charm and humility. He was a born hitmaker whose commercial career was compromised by record label issues, contractual lawsuits, and the industry’s uneven evolution over the course of the 2010s. Like Dre, Big Boi, and a host of other Southern pioneers, Quan wrote songs that smartly synthesized formal experimentation and personal introspection—with each new, clipped flow or harmonized aside, he seemed to burrow deeper into his own psyche. He leaves behind four sons.
Quan was born Dequantes Devontay Lamar in 1990 and was raised in Atlanta, where, as a teenager, he excelled as a center fielder and student of literature. He was less successful in a short-lived burglary career, which led to a 15-month bid shortly after he dropped out of Fort Valley State University. “It really sat me down and opened my eyes,” Quan told XXLof his time inside.
The first things you’d notice about his music were the titles. In 2012, Quan released his first mixtape, I Go In on Every Song, a promise on which it very nearly delivers. Early the following year, he earned his national breakthrough on the back of “Type of Way,” which made him sound a little mean and a little sensitive, and also like he nearly drowned in a vat of charisma as a small child. (That single was issued to iTunes by Def Jam, which seemed to indicate that Quan had signed to the label; in fact, he would remain locked in litigation with a smaller company, Think It’s a Game Entertainment, for many years.)
“Type of Way” came out as Future was pulling rap radio into his orbit, and it was seen by some early listeners as a variation on that Plutonic style. But in its verses, Quan skews much closer to traditional modes of rapping, using his melodic skills to augment the song rather than anchor it. It functions as an extended taunt—sometimes menacing, other times merely playful. Boasts that he can spot undercover cops with a single glance enjamb against lines like “I got a hideaway, and I go there sometimes / To give my mind a break”; memories of served subpoenas are delivered in delicate singsong. All of this knottiness and seeming contradiction is in fact corralled by Quan until it propels the song in a single direction with irrepressible momentum.
There were more titles, more hits: Still Goin In, the Gucci Mane collaboration Trust God Fuck 12, I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In. “Walk Thru,” a duet with the Compton rapper Problem (now Jason Martin), is a slick song about collecting inflated club appearance fees that nevertheless sounds like it was spawned in a nightmare. The hook he gifted to YG in 2013 helped get the regional star off the shelf at Def Jam and onto national radio for the first time. And in 2015, when he went triple platinum with his single “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he did so by distilling his style more cleanly than ever before. That song is wobbly and joyous, making rote descriptions of money earned sound like tiny spiritual breakthroughs.
All the while, his early collaborator was on his own star trajectory. Both Thug and Quan were dogged by conservative reactions to their work. It would be a couple of years before “mumble rap” was in wide use as a pejorative, but they were, predictably, seen by some resistant listeners as uninteresting writers or inadequate vocalists. Both charges were and are rooted in ideological opposition to their styles rather than earnest evaluations of their music. But even for the initiated, Quan’s suggestion that whatever he and Thug were working on would cement them as better than the Clipse or Black Star, better than Webbie and Boosie or Dead Prez or whomever, seemed improbable.
What they delivered, in September 2014, was at once bigger and smaller than anyone could have expected, seismic but nearly invisible. The tour that Tha Tour, Pt. 1 was meant to promote never really materialized; some of the Cash Money albums teased during DJ drops would be held up in labyrinthine court cases for another half decade, if they were released at all. The terrible, sub–Microsoft Paint cover dubbed the group Rich Gang, a moniker that had already been used for Baby’s other post–Cash Money branding exercises. “Lifestyle,” the massive summer hit Thug and Quan had scored under the name, wasn’t even included. Tha Tour does not exist on streaming platforms and did not spawn any new hits. But it was as Quan promised: a perfect snapshot of two eccentrics searching manically for new veins to tap. The hardest duo since Outkast.
You could credibly argue that Tha Tour is the best rap record of the 2010s. It captures Thug, one of the decade’s true supernova talents, near or at his apex—yet it would be very reasonable to suggest that Quan gets the better of him. See Quan’s verse on the shimmering “Flava,” where he shouts, buoyant, about his son inheriting his features, then makes the act of allowing a girlfriend to count his money seem more tender than any other intimate moment. Or take the harrowing “Freestyle,” its title belying the depth of thought and passion that Quan brings to the song. “My baby mama just put me on child support,” he raps:
Fuck a warrant, I ain’t going to court Don’t care what them white folks say, I just wanna see my lil boy Go to school, be a man, and sign up for college, boy Don’t be a fool, be a man, what you think that knowledge for?
On Thursday, shortly after Quan’s passing was confirmed, Quavo, one of the two surviving members of Migos, posted an Instagram story. “Good Convo With My Bro,” he wrote over a black background, and tagged Offset, with whom he’d been locked in a very public feud since shortly before their group mate Takeoff was killed in November 2022. Ten years ago, it seemed this cohort of Atlanta rappers was going to rule the industry indefinitely; today, the deaths of artists including Quan, Takeoff, Trouble, Lil Keed, and Bankroll Fresh—as well as Young Thug’s ongoing RICO trial—hang like a dark cloud over one of music’s creative meccas.
After “Flex,” Quan’s career ceased to be supported as it could or should have been by record companies; whether because of the Think It’s a Game situation, bad taste, or a lack of marketing imagination, he never again got the push he deserved. (He also never worked with Thug again: In interviews about the topic, Quan was reflective and self-critical, though some of the particulars of their falling-out may now be the concern of the Georgia justice system.) His best solo album, 2017’s thoughtful, technically virtuosic Back to the Basics, was swallowed entirely by Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, which was surprise released on the same day.
The 2019 film Uncut Gems is typical of its directors’ output. Josh and Benny Safdie are obsessed with verisimilitude—even their most outlandish scenes are populated with nonprofessional actors, their dialogue overlapping, the blocking evolving naturally, the immersion in each character’s world totally ethnographic. Gems takes place during the 2012 NBA playoffs, and the period details are managed with fastidiousness. The lone concession seems to come about halfway through, when LaKeith Stanfield’s character pulls his SUV up to a curb, playing “Type of Way” at a deafening volume. While that song wouldn’t come out until the year after the Celtics’ run, the filmmakers evidently felt that fracturing their reality was worth it for its punishing effect. This, in so many ways, sums up Quan’s career: unstuck in time ever so slightly, caught between eras, yet still, on the most fundamental level, undeniable.
Paul Thompson is the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.
They treated me like a kid. It was so frustrating. I went in, they gave me an IV with a ******** of meds, then also an intramuscular epi pen. I felt better in an hour, but they made me stay for another 5. They legally couldn’t keep me there, but that didn’t matter I guess. Whatever, I’m happy to be home and not itchy.
I’d long forgotten the enlightening words I heard from the depths of my mind on an lsd trip as a young man. I was upon a sailing ship in the vacuum of space when a tidal wave of cosmos crashed down and pitched the boat around. The words, “your greatest joy will be furthest from shore” rang out.
Decimation (from Latin decimatio ‘removal of a tenth) was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions. The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders.
A lifetime of scarfing down sci-fi, video games, and comic books brought director Brad Peyton to the job of said lifetime: directing Jennifer Lopez in a frickin’ mech-suit movie. Signing on for Atlas, now streaming on Netflix, was an easy yes: With two big-budget Dwayne Johnson vehicles under his belt, Rampage and San Andreas, Peyton was no stranger to A-list-driven spectacle. Still, the film was an intimidating prospect for someone with a deep appreciation for mech suits, mech tanks, oversized mecha, and all the made-up classifications in between.
“I was very aware of what had come out ahead of me,” Peyton tells Polygon. The director cites James Cameron’s Aliens and Avatar as obvious but undeniable milestones in the art of on-screen mechs. He knew that the Titanfall games put pressure on any new live-action attempt, having created full immersion into the experience of mech fighting. But when he started imagining how to rethink mechs, he returned to the first piece of mecha media that really blew him away: Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox.
Peyton can’t quite explain why Robot Jox was his holy grail, but in talking to him, it’s obvious: Like Gordon’s whiz-bang vision of the future, where Earth’s conflicts are settled by colorful mech duels, Atlas needed clear, well-defined logic that would ground the world-building, but also let him rip in the action department in a way that would delight his inner child. And at the end of the day, he needed to be original.
“My biggest thing was: I knew I had to separate from everything,” Peyton says. “I had no interest in repeating. I said, Pac Rim’s [mechs] are this big. In Avatar, they’re this big. In Titanfall, they’re this big. So mine is gonna be this big. This one might be square and blocky, so mine is gonna be circular. I come from animation. So a lot of it started with me sketching the silhouette and figuring how to make it unique and different.”
Atlas takes place in a relatively sunny future that still exists in the shadow of an impending apocalypse. Decades earlier, a rogue artificial intelligence named Harlan (Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu) fled Earth for an alien planet with the intent of one day returning to lay waste to humanity. When scientists discover Harlan’s whereabouts, Terran forces launch a mission to take the fight to the robot army’s doorstep. Leading the charge: Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a data analyst recruited to go full Jack Ryan on Harlan’s ass. Of course, the attack doesn’t go as smoothly as the Earthlings would hope, and Atlas has to begrudgingly click into an AI-powered mech suit in order to survive an alien planet populated with androids who want her dead.
The grounded futurism of Atlas’ Earth led Peyton and his creative team to extrapolate from current military tech for the mech design. Rounded edges and exhaust pipes are lifted from F-18 planes. The interior control panels were built for theoretical functionality.
“I had to understand all the tech from the inside out,” Peyton says. “Because of my experience on San Andreas, where I had to understand how a helicopter worked intimately to tell Dwayne what buttons to press and not to press — at least when he would listen to me! — I took that experience and wanted to make a similar experience for [Lopez]. I laid it out with the art department of why there are screens in certain places, why there are holograms in other places. And then on the day, I’m giving her little wires to be like, ‘That’s what this screen is. That’s where the screen is.’ So after going through the blocking, I pulled those away, and she had to memorize where they were.”
Image: Netflix
Drawings and schematics were only half of the equation. After drafting a design, Peyton set out to make his vision come to life. Coming at it from an animation background, that meant animating various walk cycles to see if the bipedal machine could move the right way.
“The first couple of designs we had when we animated them to see how they would work — very basic animation, walk, run, walk, jog, run cycles — looked so clunky and terrible,” Peyton says. The animation team found a groove when they clarified the dynamic between man and machine. “[The mechs] are intuitive devices. The concept that I came up with was, the soldier is the brain. He doesn’t have to be super strong. He’s not like a grunt — the machine is the grunt. He is the emotional cognitive device that syncs with this thing. So it has to be able to be as fluid as a person who’s been trained in it.”
As Atlas traverses the biomes of Harlan’s base planet — from snowy tundras to swamps inspired by Peyton’s love for Return of the Jedi — the film’s hero loosens up on her “no AI” stance and forms a cognitive link with her mech’s digital interface. Like a twist on the buddy-cop movie, the two bond for survival, which presents itself as more fluid mech motions. Early on, Atlas might be bumbling around a rocky cliff. By the end, she’s running, rolling, and slapping the hell out of robot assailants with mech-fu. The early walk cycle tests came in handy for the dramatic evolution, which Peyton was able to program into an enormous soundstage gimbal rig that stood in for the mech suit. Lopez was surprisingly well suited for the demands of the mech choreography.
“Her background as a dancer is what allowed her to really gauge that quickly,” Peyton says. “As much as she looks like she’s walking, [the mech] is walking her, and she has to react like she’s walking. So that training as a dancer allowed her to step right into it.”
Image: Netflix
It also helps that Lopez routinely performs for thousands all by her lonesome on a stadium stage. Peyton says Atlas turned out to be one of the most demanding shoots of his career, simply because for six to seven weeks, it was just Lopez performing solo on a gimbal rig that would be completely painted over with plate shots, VFX environments, and bursts of other action sequences shot elsewhere. Occasionally, voice actor Gregory James Cohan would dial in to perform the dialogue of Smith, her AI companion.
All the prep work required to realize a mech with the capacity for real action, and clicking in a star who was up to control it, was in service of jolting the audience, says Peyton. The first time we see the mechs in action isn’t in an act of valor; they’re caught in an ambush, mid-flight. The carrier ship goes down — and so does Atlas, in her rig. Peyton’s imagination swirled at the possibilities, as evidenced in the finished sequence. “[The mech] would be tumbling, it would be spinning, it would be hit by debris. What would it be like to be trapped in that tin can? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? And once I get through that experience, well then, how can I up the ante? Well, what if I fall through black clouds, and I’m falling into basically a World War II dogfight, but with mechs and drones? […] That’s just the first, I don’t know, 20 seconds of a two-minute sequence.
“That’s how I design,” he says. “I want to surprise you. I want to give you something you can’t see anywhere else.”
Sony has delisted Helldivers 2 in more than 170 countries that don’t have dedicated regions in PSN, which was the main argument against the change. These countries no longer have the ability to buy the game or activate a retail key. Steam is refunding the game even with more than 100hrs of playtime.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with my brain, I was incredibly depressed for 5 days, ready to pepsi myself and then boom, 8pm last night sitting on the couch and it went away, got up cleaned the house, went to the gym, basically like it never happened.
I started at 370lb on March 22nd 2023. I was 24 and had never been below 300lb since middle school. Just a little past the 1 year mark and I’m 25 and almost into the 240s now. My ultimate goal is 185 and it feels more achievable than ever before. It still doesn’t feel real, I can fit into regular Large clothing sizes now, granted they’re still snug but they won’t be in another 20lb or so. A year ago I was almost fitting just right into 4XL.
Madame Web was actually a cool character and the whole Secret Wars storyline was great. I did not see the new movie (and I wont), but based on the memes, its trash. Im sad that the new generation wont know the OG character, and that she will probably end up as Nimrod (who was a famous hunter, but loonytunes changed the meaning).
I saw a post about a follow tubby getting ripped in two years. There was a debate in the comments on if he was using roids or not. This is me losing 43kg and 4 pant sizes in 6 months just following what I heard from a free audio book I got called bigger leaner stronger. 100% natural going to the gym 3 days a week. Not looking for thumbs just trying to help show natty vs not.
My dog was put to sleep last night. She was my first dog and I had her for almost 10 years. She was the moodiest bitch on the planet but was always super sweet to me. I’ll miss hearing her close the laundry room door to hide from my kids and catch a break. This is a toast to a real one. Fry up some bacon just for your puppies once in a while. They deserve it.
While she grew up wanting to live among animals, she was actually approached to study the chimpanzees by Louis Leakey, an anthropologist whos research she was helping. Until Jane Goodall’s research, chimps were believed to be passive vegetarians and that only humans used tools.
My late Peruvian grandfather was quite the traveling businessman in his day. I found a luggage in his apartment filled with old currency leftover from his travels.
American, the most likely to have collectors value, or at least their official value.
Latin American. Almost all have been superceded by a newer currency, or have been massively devalued. I made sure to grab one coin with each national crest.
Saltburn has shaped up as one of 2023’s most divisive love-it-or-hate-it movies. Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her 2020 writer-director debut, Promising Young Woman, is radically different from that movie in look and tone, but her talent for pushing boundaries and demanding a response is still front and center, and Saltburn is the kind of button-pusher that generally either thrills people or makes them angry. Critics have responded both ways: “Superficially smart and deeply stupid,” Mick LaSalle grumps in the San Francisco Chronicle, while Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker calls it “a triumph of the cinema of excess, in all its orgiastic, unapologetic glory.”
And one of the most divisive elements is the ending, which can be read equally as sly art or rank titillation, depending on how you feel about full-frontal male nudity. Polygon dug into it in an interview with Fennell shortly before the movie’s release.
[Ed. note: End spoilers for Saltburn follow.]
Image: Prime
In the movie, hungry social climber Oliver (Barry Keoghan) gradually becomes close to his rich, popular Oxford classmate Felix Catton (Priscillaco-star Jacob Elordi), who brings Oliver to his immense family estate, Saltburn, and introduces him to his family. Felix’s elitist, removed parents, Sir James Catton (Richard E. Grant) and Elspeth Catton (Rosamund Pike), make a hollow show of welcoming Oliver. But Felix’s jaded sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), clearly sees him as a new toy, and Felix’s vicious, jealous cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) sees him as a rival and an unwelcome upstart.
As it happens, Farleigh is right — Oliver is lying about virtually everything that brought him together with Felix. He invented a family tragedy to make himself a tragic and dramatic figure. A series of flashbacks shows how Oliver engineered their early relationship by pretending to be penniless when he had plenty of money, and by sabotaging Felix’s bike in order to “help” when it broke down.
The later parts of their relationship are even darker: Felix appears to die in an unclear accident, and Venetia appears to kill herself out of grief. But further flashbacks show that Oliver murdered both of them, out of fear of being ejected from Saltburn, and resentment for the way they’ve both rejected him. It’s also clear that he sets Farleigh up to be disinherited, then poisons Elspeth after James dies, all in order to inherit Saltburn himself.
And in the final scene, Keoghan dances through the estate, stark naked and triumphant, waggling his ass to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” and presiding over a sad little row of memorial stones with the family members’ names on them, dredged up from the estate’s waterways to form a kind of ritual audience for his dance.
“The movie always ended with Oliver walking naked through the house,” Fennell tells Polygon. “It’s an act of desecration. It’s also an act of territory, taking on ownership, but it’s solitary.”
Photo: Chiabella James/Prime Video
As viewers watch the scene, Fennell wants them to notice Oliver’s path through the house, which is a reversal of his entry to the house earlier in the film. When Felix introduces Oliver to Saltburn with a small tour, it’s an invitation to a place that doesn’t belong to him. And when he does his dance, he’s following that same path in reverse, this time boldly claiming the space instead of shyly tiptoeing into it.
“The nudity is an act of ownership,” she says. “It wouldn’t be the same if he’s just walking through the house in his pajamas. It’s that he’s walking through his house. It’s his fucking house, and he can do whatever he wants to with it. And that’s what makes it thrilling and beautiful.”
The original script had Oliver symbolically claiming the house by walking through it, but Fennell says something about the scene as she’d planned it didn’t sit well with her. “It just became apparent as we were filming it that the naked walk was not really going to have the feeling of triumph and joy, elation and post-coital success [I wanted]. It felt lonely and sort of empty. It speaks to Barry that when I said to him, ‘I don’t think it can be a walk, I think it needs to be a dance,’ — that’s the thing about Barry as a performer. He profoundly understood and completely agreed, and knew it had to be that way. There really wasn’t another way we could do it, given the film we’d just seen. To me, it feels like the ultimate sympathy for the devil.”
Fennell has already talked about how Saltburn simultaneously has sympathy for everyone in the film, and for no one — there are no outright villains in the story, in her opinion, just people with understandably flawed ways of looking at the world. That perspective helped her sympathize with Oliver at the end, which she hopes the audience will do as well, even though he’s an unrepentant murderer.
“We have to be on his side at the end,” she says. “It’s crucial that the more violent he is, the more cruel, the more he plays them at their own game, the more we love him, even though we loved them, too. We have to feel at the end, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, get it.’ The way Oliver gets it is the way the Cattons would have got it in the first place. How do people build these houses? How do they make these houses? They’re built by violent means and got by violent means. So that’s where it ends as well.”
Golden Bachelor host Jesse Palmer wasn’t way off, for once, when, with typical Bachelor bombast, he proclaimed that the dating show’s climax would “change all of Bachelor Nation forever.” Whoever’s hosting a Bachelor finale has to make such statements, but rarely is a “stunning,” “shocking,” or “most dramatic” conclusion truly transformative for viewers who go way back with Bach. This time, it was true.
Here’s how I know: In the back half of Thursday’s tear-filled finale—which ended not just with an engagement, but also with a wedding date—ABC aired a hype package for Bachelorette Season 20 runner-up Joey Graziadei’s upcoming debut as the Bachelor. The traditional teaser contained all the requisite intrigue: frolicking, smooching, and inevitably, a sudden turn toward discord and dissolution. Joey may make a fine Bachelor, but as the drama ramped up, I found myself wondering: So what if it doesn’t work out? Joey is 28 years old. The dude has several decades to look for love. And if he fails to find it for the next 45 years, he might have a happy ending: He could be the Golden Bachelor.
With that, I realized that the latest Bachelor spinoff had unseated the supposed flagship shows in my affections, just as Theresa Nist toppled Leslie Fhima in the televised pursuit of Gerry Turner’s heart. I can’t speak for Bachelor Nation (though Bachelor Nation has spoken for itself through resurgent TV ratings). But in my household, the hierarchy of power in the Bachelor universe has changed. All other Bachelor shows will merely mark the time until the franchise gets Golden again.
Granted, I was growing apart from the franchise before The Golden Bachelor began. For years, my wife and I were Bachelor and Bachelorette regulars who treated each two-hour Bachelor block as appointment TV and dabbled in international spinoffs when we ran out of domestic supply. But in 2022, we quit cold turkey and never regretted reclaiming our Monday evenings. The proximate cause of our Bachelor breakup was a brutal back-to-back Bachelor combo of Matt James and Clayton Echard, followed by a bifurcated Bachelorette Season 19. But maybe, in our mid-30s with a kid to care for, we were just aging out of Bachelor Nation. Maybe it just seemed as if we’d seen it all.
It’s funny how fast you can go from being on a one-way first-name basis with legions of good-looking TV contestants to not knowing one aspiring influencer from another. Check out of the franchise for a season or two, and almost everyone’s a stranger, which makes it even harder to continue to care. Just as I renounced my Bachelor Nation citizenship, though, The Golden Bachelor arrived to restore my attachment.It wasn’t just a new and different Bachelor; it was a betterBachelor. Picture the Distracted Boyfriend or the guy from the “friendship ended with Mudasir” meme. That’s me moving on from my former Bachelor relationship and forming a Golden Bachelor bond.
I was one of millions of viewers who flocked back to the Bachelor banner (or tuned in for the first time) to watch the 72-year-old Gerry become the first over-40 lead in the franchise’s history. (The series debuted in 2002, back when Gerry was just 51—or more than a decade older than any other active Bachelor has been.) As of November 22, The Golden Bachelor’s premiere had drawn almost 12 million spectators across all platforms, making it the most viewed installment of any Bachelor show since the “After the Final Rose” episode of Peter Weber’s Bachelor Season 24in March 2020 (and the most watched episode of any ABC unscripted series ever on Hulu). Later episodes of Gerry’s season appear poised to top the premiere’s 35-day viewing totals. After years of declining ratings and resultantfrettingaboutthefranchise’sfuture, The Golden Bachelor has single-handedly brought backThe Bachelor’s luster. Bach was broken, but now it’s Golden.
With apologies to ostensible star Gerry (whose name is almost as hard to remember as another Indianan’s, the mayor of Pawnee), the real lead of The Golden Bachelor’s long-awaited inaugural season was mortality. “At this age we don’t know how long we have,” eventual winner Theresa told her future fiancé’s family in the pretaped portion of the finale. “We want to make the most of every moment.” Later, eventual also-ran Leslie, her hopes of a proposal sunk, sobbed, “Time is running out … time is running out.”
Leslie wasn’t lamenting the approaching end of her screen time. She was calculating the mileage left in her lifetime. How could I not feel for someone who can credibly believe that a breakup closes the door on finding a partner to spend their dwindling days with? How can I go back to watching pretty young things act like their lives are over if they don’t secure a rose when, through a Golden Bachelor lens, their journeys have barely begun? How can I stomach their confessional conversations on one-on-one dates when few of them have loved and lost like The Golden Bachelor’s septuagenarian widower and 60- or 70-something widows and divorcées? How can a regular reality show, its artificial stakes manufactured by a broadcast schedule, compete with that loudest of ticking clocks?
Like Gerry and Theresa, The Golden Bachelor tried to make the most of every moment. The series mercifully cut back on Bachelor bloat by trimming its pre-finale episodes to one hour instead of two or three. That tighter running time required difficult cuts: As Walt Disney Television executive Rob Mills told my colleague Juliet Litman on Bachelor Party, ABC resorted to airing fewer casting calls to save precious seconds. According to Mills, other series under the Bachelor umbrella may borrow aspects of this season’s successful format, whether it be briefer episodes, simpler dates, cold opens, or an emphasis on what Mills called the “three H’s”—humor, heart, and hope.
Replicating the “hope” part of the package won’t be as simple as porting the spinoff’s structure to a preexisting series. That hope is inherent in the premise of rekindling confidence and desire in a group of grief-stricken singles who’ve all but resigned themselves to surrendering sex and/or romance, in contrast to the expectant 20- and 30-somethings who typically populate Bachelor casts. As someone who watches reality TV selectively, I’ve gravitated toward The Bachelor because, more than most such series, it promises substance: true, lasting love. Like most aspects of reality TV, this is largely fiction: only sporadically does the franchise deliver engagements that don’t disintegrate soon after the new couple returns to real life. But the franchise sells itself through the spectacle of whirlwind romance and the potential for enduring relationships. On The Golden Bachelor, that’s an easier sell.
On most seasons of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise, some contestants (often egged on by producers) insist on being messy bitches who live for drama. The Golden Bachelor proved that the more reliable route to a “most dramatic” finish is a focus on the simple stakes of people’s lives. By Bachelor standards, there was scant infighting at the mansion. The squabbling was largely limited to Theresa and Kathy’s bickering about Theresa’s alleged oversharing about her connection to Gerry, highlighted by the acerbic Kathy’s instruction to “zip it.” Neither woman’s stance was entirely unreasonable, and the dispute didn’t spiral or last very long. On The Golden Bachelor,neither the contestants nor ABC had time to waste.
Refreshingly, there was next to no hand-wringing about being “ready for marriage”—why would there be, when everyone involved was familiar with making that commitment and (relative to most younger groups of contestants) emotionally mature? And with a less extremely online, Instagram-oriented cast than the franchise usually features, no one questioned whether other contestants were there for “the right reasons.” All of the energy was devoted to working through feelings for Gerry or forming friendships in the house, and not once did I wish there were a “villain” who derailed either effort. As it turns out, The Bachelor is better when viewers are sorry to see contestants sent home, not relieved to be rid of them.
That’s not to say that The Golden Bachelor always felt fully authentic. Gerry’s super-expressive, preacherly vibe and guidance counselor cadence sometimes seemed more calculated than his Hollywood glow-up, especially after The Hollywood Reporter’s recent exposé about his pre–Golden Bachelor life. The report revealed that he’d continued to work part-time after retiring (though what could be more on brand for a Bachelor than hot tub installation?); that he’d started seriously dating not long after his wife’s death, despite claiming not to have dated at all; and that he hadn’t always been as considerate and sensitive a partner as he’d portrayed himself to be on the show. That’s pretty tame stuff, by reality TV standards—especially if, as some post-exposéspin suggested, he had acknowledged the dating before—but it struck a phony note toward the end of what had seemed to be an unusually sincere season.
(Of course, this is a show where viewers and participants alike have little idea what anyone’s lives are like outside the Bachelor bubble. Gerry didn’t seem to be sold on Theresa until their fantasy suites date, when, seemingly for the first time—and at Theresa’s urging—he learned that she has a career. I wasn’t taken aback by The Hollywood Reporter’s disclosures about Gerry’s postretirement employment because I’d completely forgotten what his preretirement occupation was. Andwas everyone else aware that Gerry’s dad is still alive?)
In Thursday’s pretaped footage, a jilted, devastated Leslie accused Gerry of lying about his feelings for her. But her hurt was as real and raw as Theresa’s joy, and by episode’s end, the announcement that the “newest, oldest couple” will wed on January 4—and that Bachelor Nation is invited via the franchise’s first full wedding special since 2014—brought back the sense that this season had transcended the trappings of reality TV to become more of a shoot than a work. It seemed, at times, almost too real: “Had I known this is how much pain I would cause someone, I would have never taken the first step on this journey,” Gerry claimed. The next step comes soon: He and Theresa may not stay together till death does them part, but they’re going to get hitched. That alone sets this season apart from most Bachelor runs, on which even the lovebirds who agree to get engaged seem a long way away from walking down the aisle. This was my face for much of the finale:
ABC
One of the episode’s legitimately stunning developments—or in this case, nondevelopments—was that ABC didn’t capitalize on the Golden Bachelor buzz by confirming plans for The Golden Bachelorette. Leslie’s heartbroken but defiant reaction to getting dumped on the eve of a possible proposal positioned her as the sympathetic favorite: Her worst fears were confirmed when the man of her dreams didn’t choose her, but maybe a broadcast network will. (It might be better that way: I thought Leslie would’ve been bored by Gerry long term.) But the bench was so deep in the mansion this season that any number of women would make excellent selections, including two other late cuts, Faith and incomparable “pickleball cocaptain” Ellen. Perhaps ABC will save the news for the wedding special, as a figurative tossing of the bridal bouquet.
In the finale, Theresa described the competition she “won” thusly: “It was like a cultural moment; it wasn’t just a show.” The Bachelor has been a cultural phenomenon before, but never in quite this way. Golden Bach was embraced as a bastion of 60-plus representation, celebrated by the AARP and by think pieces in prominentpapersandmagazines. Its conception reflected how (and how long) we live:An aging population wants to see itself on-screen. But it’s true that despite the demographics, mainstream TV rarely highlights so many hearing aids, grieving senior citizens, and surviving spouses pining for departed partners—with heart and, yes, with humor. I’ve never laughed harder at a line in The Bachelor than I did at Palmer’s commentary during the pickleball group date: “I want to point out that Sandra is playing with two artificial knees, and she’s also missing her daughter’s wedding.”
Throughout the season, Gerry repeatedly recycled a line that wasn’t quite as clever as he seemed to find it—and which, tweaked and repeated mid-proposal with a pregnant pause, seemed kind of cruel: I’m not looking for a woman I can live with. I’m looking for a woman I can’t live without. After many letdowns, I was no longer looking for a Bachelor showI could live with watching. ButI’ve found the brand of Bachelor I can’t watch without.
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.
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