Gamescom 2025

Speaker 1: Okay. Coming at you live from the airport. There is a lot of intellectual property at big video game conferences. So, it's not very surprising that the security is very tight. Nonetheless, there's room for error. Back in 2002, shortly before the launch of Doom three, a demo of the game leaked online. It was version 0.02. The leak looked great. That specific build had been briefly shown months earlier at e three two thousand two. E three was a large gaming conference. It died during the pandemic. And, now this build of doom three from e3 had leaked online. Big deal. So, who did it? The suspect pool is small. In order to prepare for the demo and to optimize hardware performance, id Software, the makers of Doom three, had to share the demo code with companies so they could tweak their GPU drivers, so Doom three would run smoothly on their hardware. So, that E3 demo leaks and everyone goes, which one of you did it? And pretty quickly, a bunch of IRC chat logs and forum posts start going around publicly that said that the number one suspect internally at id Software was a graphics card provider called ATI, who had been provided version, 0.02 to optimize for it ahead of the talk. The culprit. ATI Technologies was a Canadian semiconductor company based in Markham, Ontario. They made graphics cards. Their graphics cards were in the GameCube and the Xbox three sixty. None of this is relevant. It's just historical flavor. Anyway, an internal memo from id leaks in which John Carmack, the lead programmer explains, we believe the leak of doom three came from ATI. Someone at ATI has since been fired as a result. This is done. Let's consider this a sneak peek. We're going to forge ahead. And, they did. And Doom three was a commercial and critical hit. And ATI got bought by AMD. I am talking about this in an airport because I am traveling to a video game conference. I am in the Vancouver Airport right now. I'm sitting in a weird little I think it used to be a telephone booth, but now the telephone is gone so it's just a small metal booth opposite a Tim Hortons. This is going to be a little mini road episode. I have a bunch of little weird tech stories set in the world of gaming and game conferences. I'm going to include travel color. For example, I'm about to try and go find a sleep mask for the plane because I forgot to pack one. We'll be back at it with a normal episode next. If this isn't your cup of tea, no worries. We'll catch you in the next one. For everyone else, let's go find that sleep mask on our way to Gamescom twenty twenty five here on Hacked. Okay. Just got myself a sleep mask, scoured every single duty free and miscellaneous airport stuff store in this terminal. I think I found the best one. Next stop is gonna be well, next stop is a twelve hour flight to Europe. At which point, we will reunite in a hotel room in Amsterdam, and I'll tell you all about where we're going and share some more stories. Hope any of this is usable. Wish me luck. Catch you on the other side. Amsterdam. Twelve hours of flying and some trains and a lot of jet lag later, I am in Amsterdam. But, Amsterdam, as cool as it is and as much as I'm liking all these canals is not relevant to this story. So I'm gonna tell you some stuff about where we are actually going on this trip, which is Germany. And specifically, the city of Cologne or Koln, as the German people say it. Koln is Germany's fourth largest city. It's this historic cultural center that has a, I've heard, generally pretty chill, relaxed vibe. It's got a big gothic cathedral. If you like a good Kolsch beer, it's the city for you. Kolm has a population of about, million people. And when Gamescom arrives every August, Kolm is, so normally a million people, an additional 300,000 people show up to the city for what has become the world's largest video game convention. Hotel rooms vanish, and the ones that are left ain't cheap. Trams and trains are packed. There's people in cosplay carrying merch bags. There's demos. There's, the fairgrounds at Kolmus, one of Europe's biggest convention centers become the epicenter of global gaming. There's big publishers showing off new titles. There's fans queuing up for hours to try the newest thing. And, importantly for us, there's indie studios hustling. That is why we are going there. I'll tell you about the game later. But, for now, I found another story set in this world. I was curious if I could find any instances of real time intellectual property theft actually happening on the expo floor. Like, the booth itself, not a build sent before, corporate kind of back and forth. And there was one. In March 2010, the very first PAX East was held in Boston. It was like a new big gaming convention for fans and developers, kinda like Gamescom. And among the many different demos on the floor was a new shooter from a company called Atomic Games, game called Breach. And on the final day of the show, one of the only known cases of live hacking at a game expo happens. A 20 year old attendee, Justin Demay, was caught trying to steal the game's source code. And he was trying to steal it directly off of a demo station on the show floor. May had snuck behind Atomic's booth, plugged his laptop into an Xbox three sixty developer kit, and started downloading the in progress, still kind of prototype level game. And, he managed to copy about 14 megabytes of a roughly two gigabyte build before Atomic Staff, spotted like, Oh, hey. There's a guy under that table. I go over. I imagine they pull the curtain back, and May reportedly just said, like, Yeah. You got me. I was stealing it. I think the quote I saw was to share with friends, and he said, it wasn't a big deal. Security thought otherwise. At some point in all of this back and forth, May, like, cooks it. He rips off into the crowd, and he's chased down by expo security, and eventually the Boston police come, and they arrest him there at the show. Authorities, take his laptop, and then they go back to his hotel, they get his laptop, and when they're there, they find a bunch of modded game consoles. Like, they find a modded PSP, a modded DS, and they throw him in jail for four hours and decide, You know what? We got this attempted theft. We've got these modded game consoles. We don't really know what any of this is, so we're going to charge him with larceny and attempted theft of trade secrets. They pegged the, estimated value of the 14 megabytes he had stolen at around $6,000,000 which is a number. Anyway, May posts the $200 bail, misses his initial court date, gets issued an arrest warrant, again 14 megabytes, which was dropped. In court, May shows up, plead is not guilty, and is placed on pretrial probation under these strict conditions. And they say, Okay. What you did is really, really dumb. Stay in school, kid. That was a term of his probation. You have to give up your computer. You have to stay off of the Xbox Live platform. And you have to stay out of legal trouble for eighteen months. If he followed those rules, the charges would be dropped, which it seems they were because that was the last newsworthy thing about this I read. If the first story was all about how intellectual property between different gaming companies got locked down at these events, That one's more about like the conference floor itself. And, it's kind of around here that more developers start tightening booth security and Blizzard notably banned laptops from its BlizzCon show floor when demo builds were present, All because of Justin Demay and those 14 megabytes. I'm hoping the, the bells go off while I'm recording this in my hotel room. Just so you can hear them. Okay, so why am I going to this event? Why have I flown so far for this? Well, myself and some buds are announcing a video game this week at the event. The game is called Rebounder. I'll tell you more about it, after another story later in another place. But if you ever wanted to do a really, really nice thing, it would be to Steam Wishlist it. Steam is a gaming platform. Steam's algorithm is one of those algorithms that makes or breaks a thing like this, and getting that algorithm to notice rebounder means getting it added to wish lists. So if you are at a computer with Steam installed on it, please, follow the link that's attached to this episode, reboundergame.com will also take you there. If you're out listening but you like games, please go to reboundergame.com when you're at your computer. It means the world to me. I'll tell you about it after. I'm gonna go see more Amsterdam canals and I'll catch you somewhere in Germany at the conference. And, welcome back. I have just teleported as far as you are concerned to Germany. In reality, I think it's been about five days, and I don't know if you can tell. I'm about to lose my voice. So no cat yelling in the background like last episode, but a host that won't be able to talk for much longer. This is how we do it here at Hacked. I've just stepped outside to try and find somewhere quiet to record this. Hope it sounds okay. After all this, we're gonna teleport back to Canada. You're gonna teleport. It's gonna take me, like, twenty six hours. But, we're gonna catch up with Scott with some classic hacked news to wrap it up. But, for now, I got one more story for you. Before we get to that, what have I been doing for the last four days and why have I lost my voice? I have been standing at a booth showing off our new game, Rebounder. Gamescom is spread across this giant complex. Hundreds of thousands of people walking around. I've just been handing this game to people standing in a big booth giving a spiel, probably getting very sick. And now I can talk about it because we've done our official world announcement. Rebounder is a platforming game that me and some friends have been making set inside of a comic book. It's a game about, bouncing off of these explosive spores, juggling yourself through the air, doing crazy trick shots. I'm really proud of how it looks and plays and sounds. It's gonna be coming out in about a year. Reboundergame.com. It'll be in the description. But, for now, before we teleport back to Canada to check-in on Scott, a final road story. E three two thousand three. Same conference I mentioned earlier. Valve's Half Life two is the belle of the ball. Steals the show at the show in Los Angeles. It's got this new source engine. It's got realistic physics. The enemy AI is supposed to be, like, just totally new. And they say September 30, this bad boy's coming out. Mark your calendars. September's approaching. Half Life two doesn't seem to be shipping. Gold Master discs aren't going out to production. There's no review copies. And inside Valve, the president, Gabe Newell, starts to notice some unusual behavior on his computer. Some activity that doesn't make a lot of sense. And IT staff starts suspecting maybe there's some key loggers running in the background. Valve issues a brief statement saying Half Life two is gonna be delayed to the holidays. They don't give an explanation. But on October 2, they post this plea. Newell posts publicly on Valve's fan forums outlining what happened. He says his email was compromised. Someone had access to our networks over multiple weeks. Source code was copied around September 19. And there were custom key loggers detected on multiple internal systems. And he says basically, Hey community, help us find you did this. Days after that plea, in October, a torrent of the entire game Half Life two leaks online. This isn't the first couple of levels like our first story. It's the whole game. Fans had compiled that raw code and assets into a playable but very unstable build. All those levels shown at e three in 2003 are people have them running on their systems and suddenly one of the most anticipated titles on Earth is like circulating unfinished on file share networks before launch. Morale syncs. Development kinda slows a little bit. People are trying to figure out what the heck happened here. An investigation begins. Thousands of fans respond to Newell's post. Tips start accumulating in Valve's inbox. You got usernames, emails, IRC handles. The valve Valve is like passing all this intelligence on to the FBI who's open the case. In February 2004, Valve gets an email from deguye@hushmail.com. And the writer admits to having infiltrated Valve's networks, kinda like six months earlier during which time he's just been roaming around. Claims he never wanted the code to leak instead saying he'd shared it privately and other people spread it publicly. He actually blames this griefing clan, My God, for taking that private leak and putting it into the open. And he says, I want to talk. Valve replies and over weeks start to develop a correspondence. And the suspect explains his intrusion. Basically, he had found an account that didn't have a password, and he started using that to escalate his access through their networks. And, in March, Valve comes up with this scheme. And, they conduct a phone interview with the guy pretending to be recruiters. Hey. Are you interested in a job at Valve? Explain to me the techniques of how you hacked Valve. He does. Afterwards, he actually emails them a resume signing off. I really hope you hire me. I'm not a bad guy. Just a little misguided. This is a crack at a sting plan. Valve and the FBI, prepare to fly him to Seattle for a job interview. They're like, oh, yeah. We'll cover travel and relocation, salary. Come through. It's a trap. Once he lands on US soil, he'd be arrested. Not the first time FBI has done this with a cyber criminal. But before the American sting can be executed, the German police, where I currently am, strike first. Acting on that US intelligence, they raid a small home in Schonau I'm Schwarzwald, wake up a 21 year old in his bedroom. You're under arrest. His name, Alex Gembe, alias, Ego. Born in 1982 in Southern Germany, known in underground circles as the author of a thing called Ego bot. This very powerful modular IRC controlled worm that was perfect for things like, what he did to Valve. Trivia, Ego bot actually spawned thousands of variants and was used by criminals worldwide for years. And the FBI already had him on their radar for all that it's a bunch of botnet related crimes way before the valve breach. 2006 in November, a German court convicts Gambe of computer crimes including the valve intrusion. He gets two years probation. No prison time due to being young and cooperating and saying he's sorry. US prosecutors later tie his malware to a bunch of other cases but Germany refuses extradition. In November 2004 Half Life two ships and it's acclaimed, is one of the best games of all time. Gabe Newell kind of later reflected on this publicly saying that the real cost of all this didn't have that much to do with the leak and it was more than months of lost focus during this crazy pre launch time. I have to get back to my booth. Thank you so much for joining me across a couple different countries. Next stop will be back chatting with Scott. See you in what for you will be mere moments and what for me will be like a week and a bunch of jet lag. Really appreciate you coming on this adventure. Catch you on the other side.

Speaker 2: Welcome back.

Speaker 1: I'm happy to be back.

Speaker 2: Before we hit the record button, which was our, regrets, Jordan was we were talking about how Jordan has now got virus and flu bugs and the cold bugs from every corner of the world as he shook 1,300,000 hands.

Speaker 1: There's not a hand that I have not shaken. I think the last thing I I shouted before we hit record was I have nothing. I have nothing.

Speaker 2: Well, I disagree. I think you guys have something.

Speaker 1: Oh, I appreciate that. You're too kind.

Speaker 2: First and foremost, I have so I have, like you, the listeners, just listened to the intro part of this. Jordan just sent it to me as he has just returned from Germany. And I think it's great. A, a, I think it's great. I think we need to do more travel reporting because, boy, is it fun. Missing Defcon from last year didn't get to go this year. You got to go to Germany, which is super fun to Gamescom. And, b, love it because we've never really done anything self promoting on here, and I love the fact that you're like, hey. I'm about to put a game out. I'm gonna make a episode about it. And good for you.

Speaker 1: I I was, like, tossing and turning about it a little bit. So I you could tell I, like, front loaded. I'm like, but don't worry. I have all of the little stories to

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Yes. Balance it out, means a lot. I appreciate that, man. Thank you.

Speaker 2: I think we talk about your game. Oh. I think I think if we're gonna do it, if we're gonna like, there's obviously great stories, and there's other things that I wanna talk about too.

Speaker 1: Me too. Me too.

Speaker 2: We got tagged on x in some very interesting stories about, like, Gemini CLI for coding and, Anthropix code. So I'm excited to talk about some of those things, but I think right now, let's talk about your game. Oh. I've seen it.

Speaker 1: You've seen it.

Speaker 2: Get to say it looks great, plays fun.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Very cool. So let's let's talk. Potential release date. Sorry. For the big details.

Speaker 3: A little over a year.

Speaker 2: K.

Speaker 1: But we have a lot of stuff left that we wanna work on. So, yeah, we're about a year out. We want it to be on Steam, which is you mentioned. We'd like it to be on console as well. Our last

Speaker 2: day consoles or all consoles?

Speaker 1: All of them, baby.

Speaker 2: Wow. Let's go.

Speaker 1: Let's go. I mean Yeah. Our last game, I have the Nintendo Switch cartridge, and that thing I really like that thing, so I would sure love to see it on the old Nintendo.

Speaker 2: What are we thinking mobile? We thinking mobile?

Speaker 1: Big old TBD.

Speaker 2: Big old TBD controls might be a little more challenging on mobile.

Speaker 1: IP issue.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: The, if you don't know anything about Jordan and his friend's last game, it had a couple names. I know it as Run Gun, Jump Gun, but then it got rebranded to Atomix.

Speaker 1: Yes. Atomic.

Speaker 2: And, Atomic. Sorry.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. No. You're good.

Speaker 2: Very challenging platformer.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: So if you're into challenging platformers, dig it up. I'm sure you can find it still, Jordan, with the hit. I'm sure it's on Steam. You obviously have it on Switch.

Speaker 1: You can get it on Steam. You can get it on Switch. You can get it on on mobile. You can get it wherever you you like to play your games. Atomic spelled with a k. We had to tweak the name partway through launch. So we did that. We've done some other kind of games in between, and this is our kind of big return to platforming. We learned a lot of lessons from that game. It was very challenging. Mhmm. This one is still challenging, but in a different way to try and bring more people in. It was really cool. It's like we saw tons of different types of people playing it. Like, seeing kids play it and get through it and have that experience of, like, the way a kid plays a video game and their eyes, like, light up when something new happens. It's like, oh, that was very, very cool to get to see.

Speaker 2: The previous game, being somewhat of a gamer myself and somebody who makes games and Mhmm. Has played games my entire life. I think I got to 75%, 70

Speaker 1: Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good.

Speaker 2: I'm pretty proud of that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. You feel good about I

Speaker 2: don't know.

Speaker 1: Feel good about that.

Speaker 2: If you guys have stats on how many people actually completed it, I imagine there's gonna be, like, a steam trophy for it. But I would be curious to know how many people actually made it all the way in that game because it gets insane.

Speaker 1: It gets really, really hard, and that was kind of the point of it. It was like a proudly challenging game. I think we said it was not for babies in the marketing copy. I don't know how many people finished it. I anecdotally, I know it was it was quite challenging. Yeah. This one's all about tuning that difficulty curve just a little bit differently.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So let's talk about inspiration because I know you guys pulled some inspirations for this game from a few few pieces. So let's talk about that. What's your what was your guys' inspiration in making this game?

Speaker 1: Thank you for asking. So there's a couple. There's this genre of, like, underground speed running rom hack of, like, retro platforming games. And our designer and developer, Jeremy, found this mechanic buried inside of those. And it's, like, inaccessibly hard.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And it involves kind of throwing, like, throwing a ball and bouncing off of it. Super hard, but if you can play those types of games, it's really, really fun. And the idea was, like, can we bring that core loop to a much bigger audience of people? You take that core mechanic, and then we combine it with this kind of audio visual, mostly aesthetic idea of what if you had a video game that felt felt printed rather than like rendered. So everything was like piles of ink layered on top of each other like an old comic book where you had the dots and you had the little misregistrations and glitches of printing, rather than, say, pixels. So you get that that look and that feel and that sound of a noisy analog print kind of world with this core gameplay loop of grabbing, throwing, and bouncing. Those were the two big influences we were bringing together. And then just a world of great indie games that we've loved over the years, Celeste and Super Meat Boy and all the classic platformers.

Speaker 2: Nice. Nice. So we're going all the consoles about a year out. Really cool art style. Very cool gameplay loop, gameplay mechanic. What do you think in runtime?

Speaker 3: How long do

Speaker 2: you think it'd be? How many levels you guys taking? Yeah. I don't wanna spoil it or set

Speaker 1: the expectations,

Speaker 2: but just give us, like, a

Speaker 1: so there's, like, tiers. Right? There's get to the end of the game. We're saying, like, eight ish. Eight eight hours, maybe.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Complete the whole thing, like, twenty hours. You wanna get everything twenty. And then for speed runners and people that wanna, like, just really get good at it, bottomless. You can just play this thing forever and get better and better and better and keep finding stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So the toss something in the air, jump up, bounce off that thing sounds like a mechanic I'm remembering from my childhood.

Speaker 1: You you might. There's faint

Speaker 2: distant foggy memories. Distant foggy memories. Great. Well, I'm pumped.

Speaker 3: I'm pumped

Speaker 2: to see it.

Speaker 1: I appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Let's talk, I think that's the good plug for the game. Let's talk about Gamescom itself.

Speaker 3: What else do you see that was cool?

Speaker 1: Oh, man. So much good stuff. That is a wild event. I know I kind of alluded to this. I Mhmm. I'm delirious and definitely sick right now from it. So I can't even remember what I said, but I I think I mentioned a million people live there. 300,000 people converge on it.

Speaker 2: So it's 30% increase in population for a week?

Speaker 1: Wild. Absolutely wild. The the, like, the fairgrounds themselves, Columbus is huge. You you you wanna go see something, and you you're walking for, like, twenty minutes to get to it conservatively. It's

Speaker 2: colossal. Let's hang on the name Colmas because it sounds so Christmas y.

Speaker 1: He called miss. Yeah. Go down to Colmas. I think yeah. I don't know what it translates to. Colm something.

Speaker 3: I don't know what

Speaker 1: that means. A place? I'm not sure. I and I won't be hall. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. It's like a nice facility. It's Mhmm. Wild in there. It's a pretty cool place. There's, like I said, there's, you know, families, just fans, adult fans rolling around. Like, there's everybody all over walks of life. Obviously, a ton of other, like, exhibitors from the big triple a studios down to, like, indies. Very different vibes in the different halls. You you know, you go to the you go to the the big hall, and it's almost like a theme park kind of setup where it's like a Nintendo setup is just bigger than life, and it has Sure.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They've got a $8,000,000 installation, and you guys have, like, a an unrolled sign.

Speaker 1: Totally. The sign the sign actually turned up pretty good. But, yeah, it's like a big television and some Steam Decks. And Yeah. That was kind of the energy as you go over to the major booths. And it's this huge installation. It's really cool production design, way over the top. And you're talking with, like, staff members, basically.

Speaker 2: Theatrical trailers playing on monster screens, and the trailer budget was 15 times the budget that you spent on your game? Exactly.

Speaker 1: Like Yeah. No word of a lie.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Directed by, like, a real international famous director. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Totally. Ridley Scott did the trailer for

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Pokemon a to z. And there's, like, you know, seven foot tall statues of a Pokemon and Samus. It's just wild, wild stuff. And then those are all manned by, like, you know, staff. People that were brought on to man this booth. Then you go over to the Indie Hall and there's some big spectacle type indie games because indie games have gotten really big. But a lot of the time you're talking to in in many cases, you're talking to devs. You're talking to people actually making this stuff over that hall. So it's just a really different energy. I ate more conference food than a person my age should. It's not that don't do that. Bring groceries. One guy on our team was pushing for groceries. We we should have listened more

Speaker 3: and

Speaker 1: didn't, my body just sort of hard shut down when I got home.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Your thirteenth order of spaetzle, like Yeah. You right up.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. Not good.

Speaker 2: Not great. Especially.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And you're kind of you're sort of held captive there a little bit because, like, you're gonna go get coffee thirty five minutes away off-site. It's like, no. You're gonna get coffee at the coffee booth. It's the one coffee booth that you can get coffee at. So it definitely got Groundhog Day ish. The last thing I'll say about is that by the not even by the end, like, midway through. You know, like Tetris effect where you play Tetris and you close your eyes

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 1: And you see Tetris. Mhmm. I was having that, but for the act of exhibiting this game on a conference room floor, like, I was dreaming about having interactions with people where I was, like, handing them a Steam Deck or a controller. And then I would, like, wake up and go in and do it. And then I would go back home and go back to sleep and be dreaming about it. I was like, I'm I feel crazy. I am broken.

Speaker 2: I can't believe you guys didn't

Speaker 1: Breaking down.

Speaker 2: Just, like, slide three or four days of just, like, lakeside Germany or, like, go to the Swiss Swiss lakes or something and just lay on a in a lawn chair and drink Mai Tais for, like, three days.

Speaker 1: Woulda, coulda, shoulda. That was kinda what Amsterdam was for. That that part was great. That part.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That was on the way in, though. Right? Yes. Yes. Yeah. That was more of, like,

Speaker 1: a because

Speaker 2: what was your total days in Europe? Like, nine?

Speaker 3: And

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Eight. I think I was gone for ten days in the end. Doesn't matter.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So you're you're not even touching getting over the jet lag, and then you're on a plane coming home. Totally.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Brutal.

Speaker 2: I I I as I age, I hate those style of trips.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You hate that for me.

Speaker 2: I do hate that for you.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But how have you been?

Speaker 2: I've been good. Good? I've been watching a lot of tennis. US Open, I've been playing a lot of tennis. I've been golfing, and I've been working. And that's mostly been my life. I went mountain biking, to Ferdie, British Columbia. Beautiful place. One of my favorite places. And while I was there, I golfed, tennis, mountain biked, and fished fly fished. So I've been, I had a meeting yesterday where I described living in Canada's North Summer as, like, a fleeting affair we have with enjoyable weather every year.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's, like, a month where it's the most beautiful place on Earth. Like, the longest days, the sunniest days. It's incredible.

Speaker 2: And then it just in a in an instant goes away.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And we are getting very close to that transition. Usually, it's mid September ish. It is very, very hot here right now. I don't know what it's like in Vancouver.

Speaker 1: It's toasty.

Speaker 3: But I

Speaker 2: think it was 36 yesterday. 36 Celsius. So that's, like, a 109 ish Fahrenheit, I think. 100 something. It above a 100. But the, so yeah. Just try to enjoy the last gasps of summer before we're into snowy winter video game season.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Indoor time.

Speaker 2: In which I've signed up for the rebounder playtest and wishlist it on Steam, and I recommend all of you do too.

Speaker 1: You're you're far too kind, Scott.

Speaker 2: Hey, man. We gotta use this platform for some time.

Speaker 1: So as I was shouting before we recorded, I have nothing. Like, I I have a a handful of stories I read while I was gone because that has become a compulsion. Anytime I see an interesting tech tale, I do make note of it. But I got nothing prepared. I just have links and subjects to talk about.

Speaker 2: I've got something.

Speaker 1: Okay. Take me through.

Speaker 3: So

Speaker 2: this this gentleman, Bruno, tags us on interesting stories on x, and he tagged us recently about a story that I think is just the cross section of everything that we've talked about in the last few months. It's about vibe coding and AI. It's a cross section about, like, taking over, like, a library, a publicly used library, and injecting bad code into it. And I think it's great. So I think we talk about this.

Speaker 1: Alright. Let's start here.

Speaker 2: Excuse me. So a popular NPM package got compromised. So, like, a a popular development package got compromised. Attackers updated it to run a post install script, steal secrets, but it does so in an interesting way. It looks for Claude Code or Gemini CLI, which are both command line interfaces for some of these, like, large Vibe Code platforms. So Cloud Code is kinda like this agentic system. Gemini is the same thing, and you can interact with them from the command line if you're a command line developer.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: And when it finds Cloud Code or Gemini, it then uses those systems because they typically have access to all of the file system.

Speaker 1: K.

Speaker 2: So it sends prompts into the Cloud Code AI LLM or the Gemini one and and ask it to go look for specific things, notably Bitcoin keychains. You know? So so because because these LLMs have the access to the file system, they have the ability to rip across the file system and look for things that you ask for because they're your helpful AI assistant. So this malware works by looking for those AI assistants and then leveraging their access to systematically do a bunch of tasks, compile it, and return it to themselves, which I think is kinda brilliant.

Speaker 1: So, okay, take me through because, again, I have two brain cells left, and I'm just sort of rubbing them together trying to trying

Speaker 2: to get

Speaker 1: to you know? So someone has one of these systems installed on their computer. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: One of the the one of the Cloud Code or Gemini CLR

Speaker 1: or their

Speaker 2: command line agentic code developer support AIs. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: You you got some software for Vibe Coding installed in your system. This malware gets into your system. It checks your system if you have those installed. Correct. And at which point, it basically grabs them. And instead of you vibe coding with it, it uses it to vibe upon you and just go scrubbing through your system for, like, Bitcoin keys and passwords and anything else it can do. It it hijacks the vibe coding system in order to compromise your system more fully than the malware on its own would.

Speaker 2: Correct.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: So, like, to go digging, look into, like like, the

Speaker 3: the thing with these yeah.

Speaker 2: The thing with these systems is that for them to be effective, they need file system access. Right? Like, they're opening and editing documents. They're checking stuff into your GitHub. They have so much we've delegated them so much authority over our data.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: And that's what the VibePoning is doing. It's taking control of that that access that we've delegated to it, and it's just sending it prompts. So, like, the tonnage now is not like a delivering a rat or something like that that, like, requires a bunch of technical things and might get picked up by, like, a security system or an antivirus or, endpoint detection response. This is just simply saying, hey, Gemini. Do you see any key chains in these folders? Can I have them? Summarize them for me. Hey. Do we have any API keys or, AIs? Like, summarize them into a table and return them to me. You can do all kinds of things, just plain text, and it'll go find it, summarize it, and return it to you.

Speaker 1: I wonder if the malware has to be like, is the I would be would be curious, and maybe this isn't included in the in the security report. But whether or not the malware has to be prebaked with all of those, like, plain text commands to the AI system, or if it's a remote thing where once that's on, a person could just has, like, plain, like, plain text access of your system. You're like, can you go ahead and just see if they have any crypto currency?

Speaker 2: And then I was digging. I think the the version that got reported that we got tagged in Yeah. Has a bunch of pre baked in prompts. Sure. You'll look for very specific things. But having it as remote access is would not be hard. Right. Like, opening up a socket and being able to talk to an LLM running on another person's local computer would be pretty easy.

Speaker 1: It's so easy that the Vibe coding platform, you could probably quite easily tell it to open up that socket. Like, that could be the one of the plain text commands.

Speaker 3: Well, what you do

Speaker 2: is you you just have, like, a package, another MPM package that you just say, hey, go install this package. Like, one of the first prompts is install this.

Speaker 3: I don't know what it is.

Speaker 2: A malicious package that does a callback to a server. Then you connect through to it, and then you have full control of the computer, essentially. Wow. Like, unless they've unless they've put some of the restrictions on Gemini or or, cloud CLIs, like, you're not allowed to remove files, which is a pretty common one. Like, don't Yeah. Don't I'm not gonna let the AI format my hard drive.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: But but aside from that, they pretty much have most access.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Right.

Speaker 3: So

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Bruno, friend of the show who shared this with us, was linking to a from a a tweet from Zach Overflow, and his kind of follow-up tweet to this was, this looks to be one of the first documented cases of malware which tries to coerce AI installed in your system to phone you. And that verb, coerce, is just so interesting.

Speaker 3: It's like

Speaker 1: God just tries to talk it in you because it it to me that gestures to what the fix to this would be, which is, I guess, finding ways to insulate these systems from or at least maybe train them to recognize when, inputs are coming from a bad source and how you would even begin thinking about that problem, I cannot imagine.

Speaker 2: I feel like I feel like the easiest way to do it would be kind of how they put the bumper rails on the current LLMs.

Speaker 1: K.

Speaker 2: So let you know you're just training them to to not, you know, I don't know, respond with private information, tell you how to build a bomb, etcetera, etcetera. And I feel like they're gonna have to do that, but then you're also gonna get people that are jailbreaking them. So it's just around and around we go, where we stop, nobody knows. And Yeah. I feel like the LLM AI security field is gonna start having to develop very quickly to respond to things like this because

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: They will be so powerful. They, like, they already have so much personal information, and then they have all this access now through these coding platforms. So at some point, they will be like, they are I shouldn't say at some point. They are currently the target. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: On the subject of, a lot having a lot of personal information, pivot. This is one that I was reading. It was, like, batch downloading stuff before I got on the plane and then just mainlining text stories to be able to talk about. Nice. This was interesting because we've talked about stalkerware before on this show before.

Speaker 2: Sure have.

Speaker 1: Independent security researcher, Swarang Wade, found this bug in a major stalkerware app called the Truth Spy. The super critical security flaw that basically allowed anyone to reset user passwords on an account to hijack the account, giving them complete access not to the, like, when you think about how stalkerware works, giving them complete access to a stolen victim dataset. So TruthSpy, the customers often of which are installing this software on someone else's phone without their knowledge or consent. So to put it plainly like an abusive partner basically, it created this situation where now anyone can break into that account pretty easily to steal that sensitive information from the person who had TruthSpy installed on their system. The security researcher Swarong Wade reached out to TruthSpy, didn't get a reply. TechCrunch, pals of the show, then reached out to them. The Spyware's director, a guy named Van Vardy Thew, admitted that he couldn't fix the bug bug, quote because the source code was lost.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Because go leave that one up in the air. They make this firework can't do it because they don't know where the source code is. It's good, good stuff.

Speaker 3: You know

Speaker 2: what you know what that tells me?

Speaker 1: What does that tell you?

Speaker 2: That they outsource the development to some third party in probably Russia, Ukraine, Belarus

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: North Korea. Who Vibe code? Access to the source code, and probably that backdoor was put in by the real developers.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. Yeah. That seems about right. It's like a fourth time this has happened with True Spy. And TechCrunch sort of in tandem has been doing this. Like, they they do great reporting on this. And they've tracked, like, 26 different of these spyware companies that have had similarly, like, guffaw inducing breaches and leaks in recent years, where it's just like a comically low level. It's like, like, a low level of security. It's, like, actively malicious compromises probably by a developer who left a backdoor in. I'm speculating hypothetically. Hypothetically. Hypothetically.

Speaker 2: We only talk in hypothetics in this show. Right?

Speaker 1: Of course. They've been around for, like, a decade. They've been rebranded so many times. Like, digging into the history of this company is a fascinating one. They've been called, like, copy nine and I spy you and MX spy and what like, they're just it's like a little Sure. Thing that keeps popping up in new places under a new name and then vanishes and then comes back up. In 2021, there was, like, a 400,000 victim data breach. 2023 happening in with 50,000 more people. TechCrunch was able to, like, come across some, like, leaked internal files, files showing the truths, but I also used a money laundering network, to process millions in illicit payments. They are now currently rebranded as Phone Parental, which is, an insidious pivot in their branding if you ask me. But it's the same, like, same code

Speaker 2: Same thing.

Speaker 1: Same infrastructure. So, don't use that kind of software, and sure don't use Phone Parental or whatever they call themselves next according to this.

Speaker 2: I did, I did see a news article too, that Google had announced that they had been hacked in, like, kind of a backdoor way. I think it had come through their like, a Salesforce channel, but two and a half billion Google Cloud users were potentially breached. So, yeah, I think it was Google's threat intelligence group discovered it in June ish. And, yeah, big two and a half billion. Like, I have a number of Google accounts.

Speaker 1: A lot of people do.

Speaker 2: A lot of pea I think everybody might have annoyed.

Speaker 1: They issue you one now.

Speaker 2: He said yeah. Literally. It's like, do you wanna do anything on the Internet? You need a Google account.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A little bit. K. Speaking of that's bad.

Speaker 2: That's bad. That's bad.

Speaker 1: I like the energy of this weird, delirious, tired version. Oh, that's that sucks.

Speaker 2: That's terrible.

Speaker 1: Speaking of Google, I just found this one. So, consumer tech side, Google released a announced a new line of Pixel phones.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: They seem good. They have a bunch of AI features that I think if you were Apple, it would probably look like what you were trying to do about a year ago with Apple intelligence. Nonetheless, one of them this is just like a fun little thing. There's a live translate feature for phone calls, so you can be talking to someone and it deepfakes your voice into the language. Woah. Pretty cool. Like, an actual genuinely useful thing. But it's it's so my high level of that is I'm impressed by the that as a tech concept, and that's really cool and good job. There have been, like, early reports of, like, it's glitchy and it's new and that they're just kinda coming out is people, like, on phone calls where there's some kind of error gets there's, like, a loop that emerges, some kind of problem happens, and the deep fake voice just starts screaming.

Speaker 2: Like, actually screaming? Yeah. In in a foreign language.

Speaker 1: The Verge has a go listen to the Verge cast episode. They talk about it a little bit. It's it's good fun. Yeah. I thought that was I was reading about those while I was gone. I don't think I'm a folding phone guy yet because they still cost $2,300, and I don't know what I do with it. But they are they're cool looking.

Speaker 2: I I'm shocked. We've talked about this before, but I'm shocked and, like, mildly appalled that Apple hasn't released one yet. I suspect will.

Speaker 1: Next year.

Speaker 2: Have to.

Speaker 1: I'll I'll I'll plant that flag. They're they're definitely gonna.

Speaker 2: So as a I have a what? A Apple iPhone 14 Pro supposed to be waterproof. Was supposed to be waterproof?

Speaker 1: Supposed to be. No one says supposed to be and then, like, and it was.

Speaker 2: So I went, fly fishing on the weekend and did some some deep creek crossing fishing adventures. Forgot to put my phone into my waterproof satchel that's on my chest, and it, kinda flooded. The phone still works. I I put it in a food dehydrator last night, and it worked great because all of the camera lenses so face ID stopped working and stuff because all of the camera lenses were actually completely full of water, and you can see it. So a few hours in a residential food dehydrator at a low temperature, definitely don't turn up the heat on it. Managed to do a really good job, and it is back to full functioning. But it is flagging that I probably need to get a new phone at some point. And, if they come up with a folding one, I could be tempted by that, especially if it's only a single screen. I would like to have a smaller profile phone that

Speaker 1: Oh, you like the yeah. The little square one that opens up into a normal phone versus the phone that opens up into a book. Yeah. I think they're supposed to announce them next week. But I don't think I I'm betting it's not the fold this year. I'm betting it's like a everyone's doing skinny phones, like, real thin little little rascals. So I'm guessing it's gonna be a thin thin one this year, maybe a foldy Foldy Boy next year.

Speaker 2: Foldy I I don't know. I feel like, when did Samsung release their first Foldy Boy? It's gotta be, like, seven years ago.

Speaker 1: Years. Yeah. Like, a long time.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I wonder what they're waiting for. Maybe it's just simply screen technologies, but I feel like they've gotten so good with the folding panels.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think they were probably waiting for it to be thin. I I that's my guess, is that they didn't wanna ship something that felt big and bulky. They were waiting for that. And now that we're on, like, there's been a few I can't remember if it's OnePlus or Huawei, and then I think Oppo, and then Samsung recently released super thin book style folding phones. Like, okay. That tech is there. Maybe it's a thinness and then a screen thing. I don't think they I'm sure they don't want a dud. I'm sure they don't wanna ship a, I don't know, $5,000 VR headset that 11 people buy or, make a bunch of AI promises. Like, you don't wanna do that to the iPhone. Like, that's their bread and butter. It's like you you can get a little experimenty on some of the other stuff, and that's cool and exciting. But you don't you really wanna nail the iPhone.

Speaker 2: The the dumb phone concept has always appealed to me. Yeah. Like, I would love to have I would love to have two phones. Like, one a smartphone for what I need the functionality and, like, at work and all the rest of it. And then I would love to have a dumb phone for when I, like, go away on vacation. It's like, okay. I'm gone for a week. What do I need? I need title, podcasts

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: Phone, maps. Like, I don't want email. Yeah. I

Speaker 1: always thought that I want somebody

Speaker 2: even want text messages, but you kinda need it when you're going to school.

Speaker 1: I feel like the Apple Watch with the cellular in it, like, with cellular antenna in eSIM, is so close to just being the, like, pocket watch of Follies,

Speaker 3: where it's

Speaker 1: like, I don't even wanna wear it on my wrist. I have watch like, I wanna wear a watch. I just want that tiny little square in my pocket on, like, a lanyard, and I can take it open and it's like I can take it out. It's useless for doom scrolling. But in a pinch, I could, like

Speaker 2: Yeah. Throw your AirPods in, make a phone call if you need to.

Speaker 1: Call, put on a podcast even, like Scott Spotify fire or whatever. Like, get me that bare utility of a smartphone where I can bring up a map, I can send a message, I can quickly jot, I can shout an email into

Speaker 3: it, but otherwise, that's kinda nerve.

Speaker 1: I think that would rule. And it would still be kind of in the walled garden if if, you know, you're in there. I want that's what I want.

Speaker 2: You've never you've never had an Apple Watch, have you?

Speaker 3: No. I

Speaker 2: haven't. An Apple, have you? Yeah.

Speaker 1: I've had an Apple Watch. They're good. They're they're nice. So I've never got one with the cellular though. So it's always been a an accessory satellite device. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I've had I've had a couple, and I've just realized that smartwatch is not for me. Like, my first reaction to getting them every time is to just go into notifications and disable all notifications.

Speaker 1: I found it really distracting. Yeah. And it's meant to Please leave me alone. Don't you don't have to look at your phone every single time you get a notification. But now every notification is a vibration on your bot, like, on your wrist. And that's like, well, that's that distracts me more. I don't have the the willpower for that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Could you imagine being, like, an Instagram influencer and having notifications on on your watch? And it's, oh, I got 13,000 likes on that last post, and your watch is just, like, buzzing eternally on

Speaker 3: your wrist.

Speaker 1: Battery dies in nine minutes because it's Yeah. Basically, you've turned an electric motor on. Not not great.

Speaker 2: Another thing that I wanted to chat about was a knock on to something we talked about last time we chatted about random things, which was the revenue split between NVIDIA and AMD, that Trump had installed because there's there's future growth to it as now Trump is funding Intel. So I I think I think what the government like, I'm just this is hypothetical just me thinking about it. Like, obviously, they want North America and and more specifically, The United States Of America to have its own semiconductor industry. Given how important semiconductors are, it's now a national security thing. You know? Like, they they are in everything now. Like, during COVID, when some of those some of those plants shut down, like, vehicles you couldn't buy because they all needed semis, like, etcetera, etcetera. So I think the revenue split that he's taking from AMD and Nvidia, he's now reinvesting into Intel United States' biggest semiconductor company that was literally on its way to bankruptcy to try and make sure that The United States has a semicompany.

Speaker 3: Mhmm. It's

Speaker 2: just a a a interesting follow-up to it because it

Speaker 1: kinda happened, like, a week or two away. It's interesting because it's the first thing I've heard about Intel since the last thing I heard about Intel, which is I wonder what's gonna happen to Intel. They don't seem to be doing very well and haven't been for a while. You know what I mean? Like, the the story of Intel was, like, they don't they don't got it right now. They're not and every time they come out saying, don't worry. We've got it. They then proceed to announce something that people collectively go, yeah. That that ain't it either. And that had just been sort of happening over and over and over again. And now this, and it's like, oh, that's a interesting choice in in where to pile all your chips. It's it's you're not going where the heat is. Let's say that.

Speaker 2: Well, it's becoming one of those it's it's yeah. Like, Intel has been losing market share at AMD for, I'd say, the better part of the last decade in the gaming PC space, the consumer space. Then the Threadripper series came out, and as they've been losing a lot of the server infrastructure space. And now the AI piece, they weren't even I don't even think Intel's really been at the table. Like, it's been at AMD or sorry. It's been NVIDIA so dominant, AMD chasing, and then Intel is kind of, like, not even at the conference center. They're still in the train on the way to Cologne.

Speaker 1: And they'll never get there.

Speaker 2: Well, sounds like they're gonna try. Like, I know they've been in a new market.

Speaker 1: I shouldn't say that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They're they're new. They've done something really cool with some of their announcements. Like, Intel's announced essentially stackable Intel Arc GPUs that are specifically designed for AI. And the thing that they've done that's so crazy is made them very cheap. So so if you wanted to do, like, local LLMs, things like that, typically, if you wanna run a bigger model, it's gonna cost you a lot of money. Like, you're gonna need to buy premium AMD Pro level cards, multiple of them, and they are not cheap. And Intel's kinda like, what if we sold them for $900 instead of, like, 19,000? They might be a little slower, but they'll have the they'll have the GPU memory to, like, actually

Speaker 1: this maybe as models get more efficient, speed becomes less. We've talked about this before where it's, like, cost becomes more important as the, like, dynamic range on the quality of these models gets compressed a little bit. And it's like, even though even the worst slowest one is, like, pretty

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1: Workable. And it's like, okay. Well, then then you're kinda just buy biasing for cost at that point, and the people that make the cheap pickaxes, are suddenly in contention. Totally. I hadn't been following that one. I had fully missed that story.

Speaker 2: I think before we wrap up

Speaker 3: Mhmm. Talk a little

Speaker 2: bit about your intro stories.

Speaker 3: I think Some

Speaker 2: of them were pretty interesting. The what was it? 14 megs? Yeah. The gentleman managed to see

Speaker 1: 14 megabytes, and I think they were dangling a dangling a $6,000,000 intellectual property theft, dagger above his head for that one. Yeah. Games have big budgets. I get it. But at the same time, I I think the game would have been okay.

Speaker 2: Well, the two I got two thoughts to that. One, games are very expensive and Extremely. Do you punish based on the intent of the crime, or do you punish based on what actually happened? Totally. So 14, yes. It seems insane that 14 megabytes of, like, machine code or whatever he managed to steal is worth a $6,000,000 fine. But if he had managed to steal the entire game, the piracy cost of that would have been probably in hundreds of millions.

Speaker 1: So Yeah. I I don't know how much

Speaker 2: It's It's complicated.

Speaker 1: It's very complicated. I don't know how much revenue it was gonna do if it was in that hundreds range necessarily. But I take your point that, like, if theoretically he had gotten the entire game and if theoretically he had gone on to leak it, theoretically, the the cost could have been really intense. The thing I found fun about it was that you get the sense from reading the story that it was when they found, like, a modded PSP that they're like, this isn't this isn't just a a young ne'er do well. This is a serious cyber criminal. It's like, no. That ain't what a modded PSP means. Yeah. We

Speaker 2: all had those. Let's

Speaker 1: be honest.

Speaker 3: A lot of people have those.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: The, the I'm actually old enough to remember the Half Life theft and the Half Life leak.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: And but but here's the thing too is is That was a big one. Yeah. Like, back in that WARS era of the Internet, every game got cracked. Yeah. Like, I remember going into machine code and and, you know, it's it's not that hard to bypass an activation check and stuff like that. And literally every game got released as piracy. So Yeah. It was just a bit earlier than it was supposed to be.

Speaker 1: I think that's it. It's like it's a bummer, and it like like he says in the story, the biggest issue there or one of the biggest issues there was just like the impact it had in the months prior to launch. It's like you should they would not hurt it.

Speaker 2: No. Half Life is still one of the biggest games ever.

Speaker 3: Did it

Speaker 1: go on to do pretty well? Exactly. Like the game was gonna be fine. It was more just the, like, you're cooking on this thing and you're about to put it out and it's a really big deal and you're gonna live with it for a long time and it's all hands on deck and now you have this giant distraction. That seemed to be what the issue was for them was like it's just a bummer to be this distracted by something like this when you're about to release Half Life two.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. And and I just for just for for fun, Googled what Gabe Newell's net worth is. He's worth approximately $10,000,000,000. So he I think he's doing just fine.

Speaker 1: And Half Life two is very critically well regarded, even if you take the money out of it. Like, in terms of, like, you're trying to make some it's a product, but you're trying to make some art kind of thing, and it's, like, a Half Life two is pretty good pretty good

Speaker 2: piece. Well, you can you can draw a direct line between Steam and Gabe Newell's current like, Steam became Steam because of Half Life Yeah. In my eyes, anyway. And and now what they've done with it, now how the success that they found as a platform, not just a builder is, you know, is what it is.

Speaker 1: Exactly. It's a it's like an essential piece of infrastructure of the PC gaming world, and it's it's a really cool cool platform. Yeah. No.

Speaker 2: They

Speaker 1: they things worked out okay, and I'm I'm very glad

Speaker 2: they did. Well, one of the thing and this is, I guess, the last thing I think it'd be fun to chat about in this regard is having worked on triple a video game titles

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: You were keenly aware of the the the paranoia around leaks. Yeah. Like, major major studios are so concerned with it. You know, they have people reviewing Slack conversations. They look at all your activity that you do on your computers. Like, it is a very serious thing. One of the games that I worked on had a pretty significant leak.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: They were they were all hands on deck trying trying to figure out who the leaker was. I'm not sure if they ever did. It wasn't me. Never would do it. But but the, when I look at the leak, coming from a marketing perspective

Speaker 1: okay.

Speaker 2: All I saw was great PR. So, like, when I saw the leak, I was the first thing that registered in my mind was, oh, this is intentional. And I get that a lot when I see game leaks.

Speaker 3: Like,

Speaker 2: I I got if I were to be building the communications, PR, marketing launch strategy for a triple a title, I would integrate leaks into that. You know, they do it in politics all the time. Like leaking a story to the media to get press coverage prior to an announcement or a launch or something to build hype around it. So many of these times, like like, we've talked about the GTA six leaks on the show before.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: To me, that's just good marketing. Like, everybody on the Internet talks about it. And they talk about it not only because it's an insight into something that they're excited about, but they talk about it because it's an insight that they're not supposed to have.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a secret. It's a secret. It's this thing, and you're you're not supposed to know.

Speaker 3: Yeah. If you they

Speaker 2: got through to the other side of the door that says you're not allowed to enter.

Speaker 1: The thing I found interesting, and I I don't think either of those were intentional. Just the the the response, the the way

Speaker 2: you agreed.

Speaker 1: I don't think they were. But when you look at the doom one in particular, where it was this, like, the the doom three demo was like a a big deal. It was exciting a game like that game looks passable in moments today, and it's like 20 years old. It was this like, oh my gosh. You got to see what they're doing with doom three. There was this demo at this conference hall and maybe you'll find images of it on the internet you're gonna get not gonna get to see video of it because That's not how the internet worked yet maybe you'd see a screenshot in a magazine and Suddenly this like great demo that people were so excited about going around. It's like well the number of people that got to experience how good this looked just went up a little bit. Not to the point that people were disinterested, not to the point that the majority of people who would ever play it had experienced it. But it was just like a little amplifier on that, like, and it looks pretty dang good. And no reasonable person could be expect could expect a janky leaked build to operate properly that they download it off, like, a shares site. It's like everyone knows what this is, and what it's gonna be is gonna be pretty cool.

Speaker 2: The like, the the difference for me is is leaking, like, compiled code, like, leaking a demo build of the or a dev build of the game, to me, is a much more serious thing. But when it comes just to, like, video capture of some gameplay, like QA testing, essentially, to me, that's just that's just great marketing. Video totally different. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Anytime it's been source code, especially with Half Life where it was, like, a whole game and people stitched it together and they did a mid job so it was buggy and crap. It was just like that sucks. That's just a a full blown net negative, and a bad thing for that game.

Speaker 2: 100%.

Speaker 1: A video comes out. Yeah. Like, a GTA six clip comes out, and you're like, that's just really good news for GTA six.

Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A game that didn't need much more good news.

Speaker 2: Like, if if if you if especially if it's, like, a sequel to a previous game that was well loved Totally. All it does is fire that fan base up. That's, you know, slash r slash game name gets pumped 100%. And just gets ready to put credit cards on wish list items and pre buys. I'm just like this

Speaker 1: TikTok explodes, YouTube Shorts explodes, just little vertical video clips of there's this thing. Like, the blogs all get a ton of traffic. It's like it's kinda just part of it at this point.

Speaker 2: So that that like, when I've been in those environments when things have gotten leaked, and typically, it, like, it's never been source code, but it's always, like, a little story about the game or some some inside developer does an interview that they're not supposed to, like an anonymous tip.

Speaker 1: Totally.

Speaker 2: I look at those, and I'm just like, all this is is feeding a media consumption machine to build hype around the game. And it's was shocking to me. Like, I saw it as such a positive. And then you go into an all hands stand up, and it's such a negative. Like, the entire team, the executive producer, the VP from, like, the publisher, everybody's like like, it's like a bomb went off. And I'm on the Reddit page, and everybody's just getting so hyped. And I'm like, what? Where's the disconnector?

Speaker 1: You're saying you didn't leak the camera?

Speaker 2: No. I did not. I would never do anything like that. But but but to me the when I look at it and when I've experienced it, all I like, to me it becomes just part of the communication strategy of it, and it's it's pretty dang good. Mhmm. So if if you're a AAA studio and you're not doing what they do in politics

Speaker 3: and leaking out key things

Speaker 2: to build hype around things, maybe you should check it out because it's pretty dang good.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A clip or two.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's that sweet spot, isn't there?

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: A pre trailer trailer.

Speaker 2: So anything else anything else you wanna hit about your trip?

Speaker 1: I think that's pretty much it.

Speaker 3: Need to

Speaker 2: have a nap?

Speaker 1: Oh, I'm a sleepy boy. Got too much to do to go nap, but I'm a sleepy sleepy boy. I got the cat sleeping here. Thank you for your comments that you could hear him in the last episode.

Speaker 2: Yes. You certainly could last episode. I I I just found out yesterday that this is a long weekend. Did you know this?

Speaker 1: Great news.

Speaker 2: I didn't know it was a long weekend, but apparently, it is a long weekend. Labor Day. There you go.

Speaker 1: Happy Labor Day.

Speaker 3: Happy.

Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this very weird episode. And we'll catch you in the next one.

Speaker 2: Take care, everybody.