Mike Minotti is the reviews editor of GamesBeat, frequently appears on Giant Bomb shows and podcasts, and a self admitted Disney and Arby’s enthusiast. Minus World chatted with Mike about his love of Kingdom Hearts, casseroles, what his perfect day at Disney World looks like, and more.
*Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted a year ago but the writer was too preoccupied playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure to turn in the transcript*
MW: Why would I not want to talk to a fellow Midwestern boy?
Minotti: That’s right, it is different, isn’t it? It’s a different vibe. It’s not just it’s not better, it’s not worse, of course, but it is different. And you can tell when you’re hanging out with the other Midwestern folks.
MW: You might get some “opes” in there. And you talk about casserole dishes a little bit.
Minotti: Oh, yeah, yeah. Everything’s gotta be served in some kind of pan.
MW: Give me the Mike Minotti elevator pitch for Kingdom Hearts for someone who has never played Kingdom Hearts, but might be convinced to try it.
Minotti: The elevator pitch is just a good action RPG with Donald Duck. That’s it. That’s all. If that sounds appealing to you, then you’ll like it. Kingdom Hearts is so funny. Something about Kingdom Hearts and Sonic, which happen to be two franchises that I do like a lot. The people who don’t like them. There’s something really fun about not liking those franchises I get, because the people will just hate them. I get it and I also don’t get it.
MW: I loved the first game and then for one reason or another I didn’t play any of the subsequent ones. But I have very, very fond memories of that first game. And being invested with Sora and Riku, and I keep saying I will go back and play them someday, but then there are so many of them and that is so much time. It’s a weird series.
Minotti: It is and I get people who, especially the post Kingdom Hearts 2 games where there’s just a ton of spin offs of them by the time you get to Kingdom Hearts 3, the lore got way out of control. It got very stupid. I still enjoy it because I’m a sicko, but I understand how people play Kingdom Hearts 3 and they’re like, “What the hell is even happening now?”, but Kingdom Hearts 1 was pretty simple and just a good time. And even Kingdom Hearts 2, it’s starting to get a little bit more elaborate and a little sillier, but still mostly just silly fun.
MW: It’s just documenting the gradual unraveling of Nomura’s mind. What would you say is your Most Midwestern quality?
Minotti: Gosh, my love for Arby’s is probably pretty high up there. Honestly, I literally was just there. I got my cup with me. I got a miniature Arby’s restaurant over there. I got my Arby’s hat that was sent to me by Arby’s. The town right next to mee, the main shopping area town where I live, is where the first Arby’s was. That building is now a place that sells headstones, and I drive by it, and I look at it like, “That’s the original Arby’s”.
MW: Oh wow. It should be a museum.
Minotti: I think someday I am gonna make a weird push to get a historical marker put there or something, and that’s gonna be my passion project. That’s how I’m gonna handle turning 40 in a few years, I think.
MW: Add it to the list of historical places.
Minotti: It’s kind of significant. That was the first Arby’s.
MW: It is a long running successful fast food franchise. They have the meats!
Minotti: We had a lot of those starting in Ohio because Columbus is where the first Wendy’s was. I think Ohio may be largely responsible for the obesity crisis in America. I’m not gonna lie. That might be our bad.
MW: That’s Ohio’s greatest contribution.
Minotti: I think the other Midwest thing is the fact that I just still live here, right? I don’t know very many other people doing this kind of job that haven’t have never really moved away from their hometown. I’m in the place that I was born, and that I went to school and high school in. I still live in that town, which seems like a bit of a rarity in the US, not even just in this industry, but the US anymore.
MW: What’s your top casserole?
Minotti: My mom makes an enchilada casserole, and it’s disgusting, but I love it. It’s really not a good format for that, because the tortillas just get obliterated into mush, right? There’s no texture anymore on those things.
MW: No, it’s just a fine paste. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Minotti: It would 100% be better to just make enchiladas, and yet we found a way to casserolize it. So we’re gonna fucking do it.
MW: That’s what we do.
Minotti: Exactly. We’re not messing around here anymore!
MW: That’s right. We demand to be taken seriously.
Minotti: We demand to be taken seriously, to have all of our food served in casserole form.
MW: Why wouldn’t you want all of your meals to be easily servable with spoons?
Minotti: Yeah, if my meal can’t be scooped onto my plate, I want no part in it.
MW: I think that we could start a movement together. What has it been like for you to become such a beloved fixture of the Giant Bomb community?
Minotti: It’s been wild. It honestly has been amazing. I’ve been doing the game journalism thing for over 10 years now for a while and it was, it was a dream job, right? So I already felt, you know, #blessed or whatever. But there was something wild about when things started popping off with the podcast that I did with Jeff Grubb, GamesBeat Decides at the time because he worked with me there cause he was getting these rumors and these leaks, and it’s all true. So people started watching the show and I thought, “Oh, that’s neat”. And then once Jeff was at Giant Bomb, he would invite me on and all of a sudden people were like, “Here’s a here’s a here’s a meme of Mike’s face.” Or somebody draws a picture of you, and I didn’t think anybody would ever care enough to do that. So every time I’m still kind of floored by it. There’s jokes about me being a mark for myself. And I think that’s absolutely true. I was still so tickled by the fact that anybody cares about me in some way. And you know, I’m enjoying it. Why not?
MW: Jeff Grubb, your supposed friend, did not hesitate to say that he would kill you in a game of Hug, Kill, Marry, between you and your brothers. How did that make you feel?
Minotti: Maybe he just hates the childless. He’s like Elon Musk or something and since my brothers have kids, he just couldn’t possibly stand to orphan them. Maybe it’s something like that. I don’t know. Maybe he just can’t stand my face anymore. Maybe he’s been over me for years now, but he feels stuck with me, right? He knows that he needs me to further his own brand.
MW: Oh, so you think he was trying to big league you?
Minotti: Yes. He resents that there’s more emotes of me than him on the Giant Bomb chat right now, so he wants me dead.
MW: That seems fair. Is there anything else you’d like to tell the world about Jeff Grubb? That maybe is not known? Anything you’d like to reveal about the man?
Minotti: He’s one of the nicest people I know. I should be saying something mean because he wants to kill me. I am in awe of Jeff.
MW: You are about to go in front of the Nintendo Jail Parole Board. What would you tell them to assure them you have been reformed?
Minotti: I’d have to lie because I absolutely have not. I would absolutely do it again. I would tell everybody about the Cat Shines, 1,000,000% with no remorse. What are they looking for? What do they want from me? Because that’s the problem. I think there’s probably nothing I could do at this point. I think I’m just forever in this weird bracket of media for Nintendo. It’s like, “OK, we’ll do some things with them, but they don’t get caught early again, absolutely not.” I keep hearing things and I hear things from other people, as ridiculous as I thought that was me saying how many Cat Shines in Bowser’s Fury got me in trouble, apparently it was a big deal. They changed the way that they give out codes to people and other things.
MW: You’re just one man who loves Arby’s and lives in Ohio. And you’ve changed the entire way that Nintendo handles review codes.
Minotti: I think what it really was that I said that, and I said how long it took me to beat. I think they thought everyone imagined Bowser’s Fury was going to be as long as a normal Mario game. So it’s gonna be some big scandal when people found out that it was only three hours long, even though everybody thought that was the case, everybody knew that would be the case. That’s why I never even considered that I was breaking some kind of embargo or non disclosure agreement by saying those things cause it’s like, “Who cares?” And that’s my guess. I would try to say to Nintendo. I promise you, nobody cared. I promise you that nobody decided not to buy Bowser’s Fury because I said that. And again I gave that game some kind of ridiculously high score, like a 95 or somewhere in the 95 to 100 range, right. I think if anything, I encouraged people to buy that video game. I don’t think I could have possibly cost you a single dime or bit of ill will. But if they wanna be mad about it, it’s their company. It’s fine. Like I said, they still invite me to things they still give me other opportunities.
MW: They probably have someone tailing you the whole time.
Minotti: Yeah, “What’s this red dot on my forehead? Oh no.”
MW: What is the Mike Minotti holy trifecta of Sonic games?
Minotti: Ohh, so First off people kind of get mad at me, but I think Sonic 1 still holds up really well and and in some ways might be my favorite of the Genesis games. Sonic 2 is probably better in a lot of ways, but I think even in hard critical terms, I think the soundtrack is very good in 2, but I don’t think it’s as good as Sonic 1’s. 1 is an all timer. I think Sonic 1 is more consistent with the levels. Sonic 2 is really front loaded with the good levels. The back half there’s kind of some stinkers in there, whereas for Sonic 1 just feels like a smoother ride in general and then Sonic 3, I think it’s a bit much, especially with the Knuckles aspect of it. It gets a bit too big. It’s a very vertically designed game, which isn’t necessarily my favorite. Of course it’s good. But I do think there is something pure about Sonic 1. I just kind of like the way it looks a little bit more too. Sonic 1, then Sonic Mania is just the perfect distillation of that format. I’m probably going to sound like a boomer if I just pick another 2D one, like Sonic CD, although I want to. Maybe I will go and be nostalgic and pick Sonic Adventure 1, which is just such a wild game in so many ways, the fact that a whole chapter of it has you playing as this cat who’s fishing. The bizarre mouth animations in that game. I wish I could write a story just about that. Like what is going on with the way these characters’ mouths move. And then the weird banger soundtrack of all this lyrical music. There’s something wild about Sonic Adventure.
MW: That game I remember going to my cousin’s house, who was the only person I knew that had a Dreamcast, playing that for the first time, and it blew my mind.
Minotti: So we rented a Dreamcast from Hollywood Video, a rental place, before the Dreamcast came out, and they didn’t give you a VMU so you couldn’t save. So we did play a good amount of Sonic Adventure. We had to keep it turned on so that we wouldn’t lose our progress. I usually hate saying that video games are “aged”. Usually when people say that I’m not entirely sure what they’re trying to say other than, “This doesn’t feel like a modern game”, but I think there’s still a lot of value here. Like nobody says Casablanca “aged”, of course it is of its time. But we don’t have to be like, “This is ‘aged’”. I guess it’s literally aged. Yes, of course it is now so many years older than it was when it came out. Having said all that, with Sonic Adventure, there is something about it that aged real quick in terms of when it came out, it seemed like the most pristine AAA thing ever, and then aspects of that began feeling kind of cheap and ugly pretty quickly. And yet I still love it.
MW: It still has a place in my heart. Would you like to wildly speculate about the launch lineup for the Switch 2?
Minotti: Yes, absolutely.
MW: I think we get Super Mario Odyssey 2. That is my hope, that is my dream, or just another Mario game.
Minotti: We are 1,000,000% getting a new 3D Mario game. I’m not sure it’s gonna be Odyssey 2 or what it’s going to be, but absolutely that team has been working on something. Odyssey came out like seven years ago now and then they did work on Bowser’s Fury, which isn’t nothing, but still that’s been a while now. And that wasn’t a full game.
MW: I know the speculation was that Bowser’s Fury was a proof of concept thing, right? Testing the waters.
Minotti: Messing around with the more open design, right. And they did it in this safe way using just straight up the 3D World engine and mechanics and power ups, but you can obviously see how that could be expanded. Especially with new hardware.
MW: Will the Metroid fans be respected?
Minotti: Yes, Metroid Prime 4 will be a Switch 2 launch game. I don’t care what Jeff(Grubb) says, I don’t care what anyone else says. That’s not coming out as a Switch 1 exclusive. Look, you gotta have something besides just Mario. I think there is a value in having Metroid there. People are always like, “Metroid doesn’t sell”, look, I know it doesn’t sell as much as a Mario game, but there is still value in games that sell two or three million copies.
MW: It’s still a marquee title.
Minotti: There’s a lot of cultural penetration with Metroid and Samus, it matters a lot to very specific people, as you can call that niche, I suppose, but I think sometimes we hear niche, we may think. “Ohh, so it doesn’t matter.” Well, no, I think it matters a lot and it can do a lot of good for a console launch. They’ve been pretty good with Samus. After it got kind of quiet following the disaster of Other M, even though I’m a little bit of an Other M defender, I have to admit. And we got Samus Returns and then Metroid Dread and Metroid Prime Remastered. All these things within the last 10 years or so, and they’ve all been good. So I think Nintendo gets it with Metroid. I think that they have reasonable expectations for it. I think more than anything else is just timing. If Metroid Prime 4 is probably almost done at this point, I think you just save that for the Switch 2.
MW: What about Animal Crossing?
Minotti: Animal Crossing is more of a year two or year three thing. I don’t think you’ll launch with that. I think that’s gonna be a marquee title for a different year. It’s going to be huge, right? Because this will be the first one following the pandemic Animal Crossing that became the biggest game in the world because of circumstances. It’s gonna be interesting to see how Animal Crossing responds to that. Is it just Animal Crossing again? Are they going to act like it didn’t become the biggest game in the world? Or is it gonna be like a little bit of extra juice on there now because of that?
MW: Maybe they’ll put out Wind Waker HD finally.
Minotti: That’s one where it’s like OK, maybe I gotta be careful cause that was the one time I got in trouble where I thought that Wind Waker was gonna get announced at a Nintendo Direct, and then that didn’t happen but. So don’t take my word for it. This is just me speculating, but Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD, those seem like things maybe you do put those on the Switch 1.
MW: They’re glaring omissions from the current switch catalog.
Minotti: I do think there’s gonna be more ports and remasters and things like that. Or or even remakes like we’re getting with Thousand Year Door. Many more of those and Wind Waker and Twilight Princess would make a ton of sense, and I’d be so happy. I love Wind Waker. It is one of my favorite games.
MW: It’s so good, right? That’s probably my third favorite Zelda game.
Minotti: Number one for me still. I think it’s my number one favorite Zelda game. I don’t know why, but well, you know, I’m a Disney freak just because the cel shading hits me hard.
MW: It just looks so good, man! People that get upset about that art style still, or did back in the day, I don’t wanna associate with them at all.
Minotti: I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I am proud of the fact that I thought that game looked good immediately. The moment I saw that first Space World trailer. And I was so baffled at the time when people were upset with how it looked. Although too baffled because that was really, the peak of,”Oh, kiddy Nintendo blah blah blah”, because all the people who were children when the NES came out now were edgy fifteen year olds like me, that was my age. But I was just so Disney brained my whole life I never really had my edgy teenage years. I skipped that whole phase.
MW: I feel I would regret it if I didn’t ask at least one Disney related question outside of Kingdom Hearts. What’s Mike Minotti’s perfect day at Disney World?
Minotti: I think it’s probably going to be at Animal Kingdom. which has been my favorite park lately. I think I’d actually start the day by going over to the Animal Kingdom Lodge, the hotel, and going to Boma, getting breakfast at Boma buffet. It’s pleasant there. It’s bustling, but in a pleasant way. It’s a lot of people, obviously getting ready to go out to the parks. Everyone’s excited. It’s a buffet so you can get whatever you want. And from there, you just mosey on over to Animal Kingdom. And it’s early so the animals are out, they’re very excited. So that’s when you go do the Kilimanjaro Safari.
MW: I did that last year. So cool.
Minotti: It’s so cool. And doing it earlier in the day is best because the animals are more active. You’ll go by that lion, he might even roar at you. So that’ll be fun. Then spend a lot of time in Pandora, the Avatar section. Get on Flight of Passage; One of the best rides in that park. Just kind of taking the view. But most importantly, go and sign in so you can get a spot at the Nomad Lounge, the greatest bar—maybe my favorite bar in the world. Get myself a Tempting Tigress cocktail, or some of their gluten free churros, which are the best churros in the world, I guess gluten wasn’t necessary after all. Maybe an order of that lobster Mac and cheese. Just sit there for a while. And then honestly, whatever else I do in the park that day is great. But that’s all I need for it to be the ideal, perfect day at Disney World.
MW: There you have it. I have a few questions from the Giant bomb community Discord: What is your favorite emote with your face on it and what is your least in the Giant Bomb Discord?
Minotti: Well, my least favorite is easily the one with apple. That’s disgusting. It’s gross, and everyone should be ashamed for looking at it, or using it, or thinking about it. For the favorite one, I do like the one with me and the Arby’s hat looking just kind of disheveled for some reason. That’s one of the older ones, which is fun. There’s the one, I think from when Tam told me to grow up and I kind of recoil in fear. I just look devastated. That one always makes me laugh.
MW: A Giant Bomb genie grants you 3 wishes, but you can only use them on Giant Bomb content and related media. What are your wishes?
Minotti: One, I get my own series where I play through all of the Myst games called either “The Fear of Mysting Out” or the “The Fear of Mitching Out with Myst”, no, I don’t know something like that. To be determined.
MW: We can workshop the title. That’s fine. What else?
Minotti: The other thing is another series where I do nothing but play licensed Disney games on a bunch of consoles, you know, pretty recently I played Treasure Planet on the PS2. It’s like it’s just some licensed 3D platformer, yet I had a ton of fun with that. It was a good time. I feel like I probably at some point people want me to wish for vindictive things, like, “I want a bucket of shit to fall on Dan Ryckert!”.
MW: I mean, you can wish for that. It is Giant Bomb related.
Minotti: I’m not a very vengeful person. Gosh, what’s my other one? I just love being on that stuff, and I always make time whenever I can to do it. And honestly, I wish I could just be on it constantly. I hope this doesn’t sound narcissistic, but if I could be on everything I I could. I just love being there. I love hanging out with them. Just being involved and being part of that group, they are all fantastic, right? Every single person there from all the regulars work there. Minus Jeff Grubb who wants to kill me, that’s fine. You know, even like the regulars that pop in a lot. And freelancers, what have you? I adore everybody there. I have such a good time.
MW: Of Sonic’s friends, who would you date and why? (Comic characters are OK.)
Minotti: Ohh, then Sally Acorn right away. Oh oh. Or, Bunnie Rabbot. Bunnie Rabbot hsa the same accent as Rogue from the X-Men. So yeah, we’ll go with Bunnie Rabbot. Actually, Sally Acorn- Pretty cool. Sally Acorn takes herself a bit too seriously, and you know, I just feel like I don’t know what we’d talk about.
MW: Fair enough. Last question from the GB discord, “Will you sign my feet at PAX West?”
Minotti: My instinct was to say “yes”. And now I’m thinking maybe there need to be some boundaries. I don’t know. I don’t know if I should be signing people’s bodies. I’m going to consult people. I would ask Dan Ryckert what he thinks. Cause if Dan Ryckert says he wouldn’t do it, then I’m like, “Alright I probably shouldn’t then.” If that’s crossing a line for Dan, then that’s a good sign for me that maybe I shouldn’t. So to be determined. I gotta think on that one.
MW: Mike, those are all of my questions. You write for James beat.
Minotti: Managing editor at GamesBeat.
MW: And you’re on Giant Bomb pretty frequently. Is there anything else that you’d like to plug, or tell the Hard Drive audience about?
Minotti: 90s Disney is the other big one. That’s the Disney podcast that I do with my brothers. That’s at 90sdisney.com or 90s Disney everywhere podcasts are. That’s been fun and that’s that’s also been able to pop off a bit just from talking about it on places like Giant Bomb, and and and hopefully here. So having more people come to that podcast. I love video games, but there is something neat about getting to talk about that Disney side of me also. Right. You know, I think people are mostly good with it, right? And I think so often the other hobby of people in gaming is either movies or wrestling, and there’s nothing wrong with that. So I like being a little bit more off beat, my thing is Disney theme parks. And that’s what you’re gonna have to all hear about. A lot.
MW: Hey, if everyone else has to listen to wrestling jargon and hockey nonsense it’s only fair.
Minotti: That’s true, brother.
