Danny O’Dwyer is the founder of Noclip, makers of fine video game documentaries. Prior to Noclip Danny worked at GameSpot, and appeared as a frequent guest on GiantBomb.com videos and the Giant Bombcast. Danny spoke with Minus World about digging for treasure in the boxes upon boxes of archival footage that spans decades of game history, where he sees Noclip going in the future, what the film Banshees of Inisherin means to him as an Irishman, and more.
MW: What’s the game that you’ve enjoyed the most so far this year?
Danny O’Dwyer: This year it’s probably Balatro or Balatro, the pronunciation is not going to come across very well in this written article, so I’m not sure why I corrected myself there.
MW: I interviewed the dev, and according to them it’s pronounced Balatro.(/ˈbɑːlɑːtroʊ/ BAH-lah-troh)
O’Dwyer: I have also interviewed LocalThunk for our new podcast, Dear Dwyery, which is coming out very soon. It’s a new developer focused podcast from the people who brought you Noclip documentaries. Plug plug plug wink wink. yeah. And also what’s interesting about that guy is that he just goes by LocalThunk and doesn’t turn his webcam on, he is a private dude. His background in development is that he just used to make games for his mates, and then eventually made this thing because he liked Big Two and it blew up. It’s crazy though, when you meet these people who are able to not just code the game, but also do all the art and then figure out sound design, you know, in their spare time. So it’s probably that or Cyberpunk 2077. Which I’ve gone back to because we’re doing a series on Cyberpunk on Noclip. We’re filming it all in Poland and Boston, and we have filmed a bunch of interviews at GDC. I played that game a bunch when it first came out, and to play it post 2.0 and Phantom Liberty is kind of bittersweet because it’s absolutely brilliant. The quest structure in that game is like nothing else. I think if you play Cyberpunk and then go play a game like Red Dead Redemption, you realize how Rock Star’s games, even though they make the most amazing open world, when you go on a quest you’re on the quest and then you get off. It’s like getting on a train, you know? And then when the quest is over, you get off the train. Whereas in Cyberpunk the quests are just happening and you can get lost on another quest halfway through it, and then it picks up later. It’s really remarkable and completely makes sense why that game was so buggy. Because it just seems like a nightmare to make a game like that.
MW: I went back to it after Phantom Liberty came out after playing 20-30 hours of the base game at launch, and after Phantom Liberty it was the game I had wanted it to be when it first came out.
O’Dwyer: Yeah. It’s a shame that it took them that long, but there’s no easy answers to why that’s the case. So that’s why we’re interviewing, like, 30 people for this thing.
MW: Has working directly with devs made you a more lenient reviewer than when you were working at GameSpot now that you know how the sausage is made?
O’Dwyer: I haven’t officially reviewed a game since I left Gamespot. I’ve done some stuff on my YouTube channel, but that’s basically why I left to do Noclip. I lived with the revolutionaries and now I was becoming a revolutionary, you know what I mean? I had seen too much of the other side of the fence, and I was just sort of struck by how, at least back then, I think it has changed, but back then, a lot of games press people were speaking about design with such unearned authority, in a way that like when you know nothing about something, you think you know loads, you know what I mean? Like if you know a little bit about something, at least you realize how little you know. And I had a background in software development like web software stuff, and I had done some C-sharp and made ActionScript games. I had a tiny amount of ideas of how this stuff was put together, but it was when I started talking to developers and asking them questions that were a bit more technical without having the technical verbiage myself. I was slowly getting into the deeper layers of what goes into things. At a certain point I just couldn’t. The biggest problem was I had an opinion show where I was talking about game design at a certain point I was like, I have to shut the fuck up. I can’t sit here and say, “This is the way games should be made,” because this is a huge pyramid of knowledge that I have to fucking spend some years climbing up if I’m going to start doing that again. That’s why when I started Noclip, I’ll be on camera for the purpose of hosting this thing, but we are going to talk to the experts about this shit. That was weirdly, I won’t say radical, but it was outside the box thinking. People talked to game developers when they were about to release a game because they wanted them to hype it up to sell us, but they weren’t asking about the craft. The only other place you’d see is like GDC talks. But this is before Game Maker’s Toolkit. This is before Tim Cain had his own 100,000 subscriber YouTube channel where he just talks about design. This was only seven and a half years ago. So yeah, that’s why I stopped. And it’s why to this day when I talk about games, I couch it. And this is in a very subjective way. I talk about like, this is what I think. Or if I criticize a game for a certain thing that I think maybe design wise isn’t good. I usually couch it in like, oh, but perhaps because of this, or perhaps they didn’t have enough money or thought about this thing or that thing. So I’ve totally, unfortunately, come out the other side just with, you know, much, much more qualifiers.
MW: Your teeth have been filed down as a critic?
O’Dwyer: I think I’ve always been largely an empathetic person, and I always hated the whole angry gamer thing, whether or not it was a journalist doing it or a YouTuber or whatever. I think it’s so easy to just appeal to people’s base reactions to things. There’s really good money in it. You can build an audience really well, find a game that people don’t like. There was a couple of years there, or if you just spent a lot of time complaining about Bethesda, you’d get a lot of YouTube subscribers. I mean, people have built careers on that stuff, and it just seemed so, I don’t know, boring or something Black Mirror-ish about the whole thing. I wasn’t interested in building the audience. I was interested in learning. And don’t think I have the patience and dedication to make games myself. So this is the really sort of backdoor way of learning about how games are made without actually having to do a lot of work.
MW: Yeah, you figured it out.
O’Dwyer: We’re all still figuring it out. That’s the whole point, right? The road is the point. Destination is never the point of it.
MW: Why is it important to preserve the type of material that you are uploading to the Noclip game history archive?
O’Dwyer: I think it’s because I saw how quickly that stuff can disappear. I was at Gamespot when they made the big swap from their old content management system and video robot to a much more versatile, modern one. But in so doing, they basically deleted a decade or more of video stuff, though I think it’d all been converted to swift files or something. And having grown up a Gamespot fan, that’s why I ended up working there. There’s a reason why the giant bomb Reddit community has backed everything up on archive.org because like a lot of them were there during the Gamespot days, and a lot of that stuff you can’t really get anymore. So when we got this cache of stuff, some of it is going to exist on the internet somewhere. I have a mini DV camcorder over there and in the evening, we’ll just grab 20 tapes and just put them in and play them on the camcorder. Like footage of Black And White 2, but it’s post-release Black And White 2. We don’t need to back this up. It looks like shit, it’s 480p or less. So there’s stuff like that that doesn’t warrant it. And then we run into a 1080p version of the Sony PlayStation 3 conference and you’re like, “Jesus. Oh my God. There’s like 5 or 6 different moments in this which are part of gamer history, and the only versions we have online now are screen grabs of copies of IGN streams that have been copied from Vimeo to YouTube to Dailymotion and then here’s 1080p. It never even hit the internet that good.” You know what I mean? It was never that good.
MW: All we had was the potato quality version.
O’Dwyer: Exactly. So when you say, “How important is it?”, some of it’s really important. Some of it’s not important at all. The difficult part is looking at this mountain of boxes and figuring out where you put your energy.
MW: Do you have a Noclip intern pilfering through and separating the wheat from the chaff?
O’Dwyer: I wish, no, we’re a small operation. There’s only really two of us who are full time and two part time and, and no it’s just me, man. It’s just me right now. It’s my garage. I converted my garage into a studio. And we have a separate lock up that’s temperature controlled that has the bulk of the stuff as well. So I go there and grab whatever. It just takes time. And that’s why we slowed down a bit over the holidays. Because we moved offices and then we slowed down again recently because I had to have surgery and take a couple of weeks off. So we’ll get to it. But in my head, this is going to be a ten year project. So like if we’re slow for a couple of months, sure. It’s been a while, we can wait a bit longer. It’s fine.
MW: What’s the most interesting thing that you’ve found so far?
O’Dwyer: The conferences are great. I think the my favorite things I found were the ones that I’ve had to kind of edit. A lot of the stuff is just raw tapes of things. There was one that was just like a raw tape of Infinity Ward, with Vince Zampella, and Jason West during the development of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, doing a tour of Infinity Ward. But it was just the raw tape. There’s a world in which you upload the raw tape, but there’s 30% or 20% of this of the people just getting the shot right or moving a light or something. So what I did was actually take some time to edit it together, which was crazy because that was basically me just pretending I was a GameSpot employee back in 2007, which was my dream. I had a lot of fun doing that, the ones I’ve had to do a bit of editing on or, for instance, there’s a trailer for Eight Days. The canceled game that had this really bombastic CG shootout trailer, and some of these had the audio from the auditorium playing maybe and maybe not the actual connected audio. Some of the tapes had five or six different channels of audio so you can isolate stuff. Or there were some cases where we grabbed the audio from worse quality versions that exist online, and took that and put that audio underneath the really good video, just to make sure that we had the best version, even though that wasn’t the version on the tape. The version on the tape had people going “woo” in the background or whatever. Then what we often did was we had the “woo” version in the big version, so we’re retaining everything. But to me it’s the ones like that. It’s the ones that I got to have a bit of fun doing a little bit of editing on them. There was a Kentia Hall whole tour from E3 2006 that Tor Thorson, may he rest in peace, he died a few years ago. Great dude. He was a host and a journalist at Gamespot for years. But that was a raw tape that they had presumably edited into a feature at some stage, but that feature is gone. So I just edited my own version of the feature using the way they would have done it. I think that stuff that’s more interesting to put together.
MW: Right on. What’s the most horrifying thing that you found?
O’Dwyer: Oh man. There was one DVD that just had “Halo 2 Demo” written on it, and I was like, “Oh, that that could be anything”. And when I put it in it was literally the file that presumably Bungie just gave to Gamespot. That was the original, real time demo for Halo 2. That’s another infamous demo. I think people have found a pretty good quality version of that over the years. It was just the fact that it was stuffed in like a box, because they’re CDs, right? So the CDs are just loose. You’ll just be in a box somewhere and you’ll fucking pick up a couple of tapes, and there’s suddenly a CD there. And that was one of them. So it’s the fact that you don’t know what’s on these things and when you find one that’s really good. There’s a Miyamoto interview we have. I don’t think we’ve put it up yet, but there’s a Miyamoto interview we have that’s like five minutes after the Wii is announced, this interview happens, and it’s the first interview with Miyamoto about the Wii. And some stuff we’re cutting out, like if there’s a journalist asking questions or stuff like that, if there’s somebody who didn’t ask to be on the international stage 20 years later, there’s some stuff where we’re editing it out if we need to, just to retain people’s privacy. The people who are being interviewed, they’ve given up their privacy, they’re being interviewed, they know there’s a camera pointed at them. But any of the stuff around the fringes, like producers or marketing people, we’re trying to cut that stuff out. But the questions that journalists were asking were such weird questions because they didn’t know what the Wii was yet. We just found out about it.
MW: It has a remote?!
O’Dwyer: Yeah. Without the context of this is literally the first time anyone’s talked to Miyamoto about this new Mario game and the Wii you’d think this person didn’t know what they were doing? So there’s some stuff like that where you’re like, “We gotta fix this one up a bit.”
MW: I’ve seen you post screenshots from The Banshees of Inisherin a few times. I adore that movie, and I was curious, as an Irish person, what does that film mean to you?
O’Dwyer: I really like that movie because to me, it was a very clear parable for the Civil War that happened right after the 1916 Rising. Which is sort of a dark time for Irish and Irish history. There are a lot of bummer years, but that one in particular where the house is divided basically. There were a lot of Heaney poems, and poems about brothers fighting brothers and stuff like that. There’s an old Irish story, I think it’s called The Sniper, which is about a sniper taking shots of people outside the GPO wherever it was in Dublin. And then, you know, spoilers: One of the people who he kills, ends up being related to him. So for me, when I was watching it, it felt very close to that. And during the movie there is fighting on the mainland, you can hear them referencing it. So I think I read it like that because any part of Irish history that gets spread out a little bit, even if it’s kind of that way where it’s kind of hidden in a different story, I really like that. It’s always cool to see Irish actors telling stories in the country. Colin Farrell has been in a lot of Irish movies. Cillian Murphy in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. And it’s fun because we’re a small country. It’s 5 million people or whatever. We have an Oscar winner now with Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. It’s like punching above our weight a little bit. It’s pretty cool, especially when it’s a movie set in Ireland. You know? Just proud of it, you know? It’s a great movie too. It’s very funny.
MW: How did Noclip get involved with Stunt Derby?
O’Dwyer: Alex is someone I’ve respected for years. I’ve been a big fan of his games before I was even in America. I remember watching him and those guys win the Shamus McNally Award at the IGF for Blast Miner, and it’s my favorite ever win at that award show, because one of the guys on the dev team literally walks up and reads three sentences from Dianetics and then walks off the stage, and he’s not a Scientologist. It was a joke. I thought that was hilarious. So I’ve respected Alex for years. We did a small documentary about Gish with him and Edmund McMillen a few years back. To me, he’s always been one of these guys who ‘s an absolute genius programmer, but he’s kind of like a Simon who never has Garfunkel. He’s absolutely brilliant at what he does. And Gish is a good example of he pairs up with somebody who’s got a really strong art style and they make something super, super memorable. Right? Alex also made like the original Bridge Builder back in the day, which is iconic. And he did that all on his own. And he just makes these amazing names that you can’t believe one person worked on them. He’d been working on Sub Rosa for years, and it had sort of plateaued in sales, and he’d worked on it for an extra year and a half, probably to his detriment, trying to keep that hardcore community happy. And they were pissed off because there weren’t enough updates coming to the game. And he’s on his own, earning no money from it. So he’s at a stage in his career, where maybe “I’ll just go and get that really high paying job as a software engineer somewhere,” and I was like, “Do you want to try one more? I’ve got, you know, some money, put aside, maybe I could hire you for a month or two and we could work on something, and we’ll use it as an excuse to learn more about how games are made and marketed.” And obviously now it’s been almost two years. It’s not like Alex is on our payroll. He’s doing a lot of that sort of stuff on the side and for free. He’s doing other projects too. But, that’s how it started at least, me trying to learn more about it and also trying to see if maybe with Noclip’s audience, we could get Alex a bit more of an audience that he deserves as well. It’s been a crazy journey, the whole thing. I don’t know how people make games. It’s incredibly time consuming and stressful. I absolutely adore Stunt Derby. It will come out. During this year we’ll have some sort of release, but we’re still trying to figure out the last push, and how to finance it and all that.
MW: You touched on this a little bit whenever we were talking about your history leaving Gamespot, but why do games deserve the type of in-depth, high production value documentaries that Noclip produces? Is “deserves” the right word?
O’Dwyer: Deserve is an interesting word. Because I think all creators of art should struggle to make what they make, and there should be no assumption that it deserves to exist. I feel like they need to earn it. The games themselves when they come out and they’re popular. They make their own audiences, right?
To me, one of the saddest things about playing a game you love is when you finish it. Especially games because you spend so much time with them. And sometimes that’s like a transitional period. Like a multiplayer game you play for a long time, and you play it less and less. Sometimes it’s super abrupt. Like a single player game you fell in love with, and then you eventually, woefully decide to do the final quest and then you finish it. And it sucks. I think providing something that we can allow people to enjoy a little bit more about the game and aspects of the game that they maybe wouldn’t have gotten by just playing the game like a facet or looking at it through a prism that they wouldn’t have got as a player. And also a way to show people who maybe didn’t play a game how this stuff is put together, and how difficult it is to make these things. I think people love games that they really enjoy. But I think you can love games that you didn’t enjoy. If you see how much work and craft and strife went into making it as well. So that’s kind of what we try to do, is expose not just the human element, but also the creative struggle that is there to make any game. and hopefully make people like the games that exist out there, the ones that play and the ones that don’t play a little bit more, maybe respect it a bit more, and maybe be more empathetic to developers. That was kind of our main mission for a while: to try and create a bridge of empathy between players and developers. Because I felt like there was a lot of animosity there. Yeah, for no reason.
MW: It’s been close to eight years since you left Gamespot to found Noclip. And in that time you’ve put out dozens of documentaries, including ones about some of your very favorite games. Where do you see Noclip eight years from now?
O’Dwyer: I’ve always been super honest with our Patreon community. It’s kind of where we get in the weeds about a lot of this stuff. I want to be doing this for as long as it makes sense for me to be doing this. I definitely wanna be doing it in eight years. Apart from my time at Gamespot UK and Gamespot US I’ve kind of always worked for myself. I was a freelance web developer when I was a teenager. I used to run my own companies. I like being in charge of shit, and I like making the business decisions as well as the creative decisions. And Noclip is like this perfect storm where I got to run the company. I get to make the documentaries that I enjoy making and work on ones that I know that I’m not interested in the games myself, but I know people will be interested in them. And it’s not a business that needs to grow much. And we’re remarkably stable on Patreon. We retain people for a long period of time. Whenever it gets boring, maybe you feel that itch of like, “Oh, is this getting a little bit tired?”Then I do the work and we as a team do the work to mix it up and make it interesting. That’s why we did the Hades series, because we were like, all right, let’s do something long form where we’re embedded, or let’s put all of our resources that we do into our big projects into weird indie games. Let’s make a 90 minute long documentary about Immortality. Like, who the fuck is going to watch that? How many people in the world have completed Immortality? Same for our Pentiment one. Or let’s let’s do a fucking two hour documentary about the Black Mesa mod. Let’s just keep it weird and keep things interesting.
I want Noclip to be around forever. As long as it’s needed. The only thing I can see is if at a certain stage developers are talking to players, and they don’t need Noclip anymore. Maybe in that world it disappears, and I come up with another thing that interests me. I want to outlast everyone. This is a bit of a sidebar maybe, for years and years and years I remember my struggle career wise was I needed a break into the games industry. And then once I got in, I was like, “Okay, now I need to figure out how to stay here for as long as I can and not do the job I don’t want to do.”And what happened to a lot of journalists is that you end up inevitably making a jump over to PR or marketing because you have a mortgage, or you have two kids that you need to feed and journalism work, the longer you’re in it, the more shaky the ground feels, right? It’s tricky. It’s not a 20 year career. You know what I mean? It’s very, very difficult to do that. And at that time there were very few people in the industry that had had long careers. So for me, establishing Noclip was also a way of establishing that I was in control of everything. And if this thing falls apart, then it’s on me. But I’m not going to get fired by some fucking hack who doesn’t have a clue about the work that I do because their VC boss is axing 20 people. And I’d seen that happen at Gamespot. I’d seen a bunch of really talented people get fired or way more talented than me, but they probably were earning more, and they got let go. So for me, it’s that I have no desire to get back into the regular workforce. And I think there’s no shortage of stories to tell.
MW: Absolutely. Yeah.
O’Dwyer: The games are coming out at a rate that is faster than us being able to document them. I’m surprised more people don’t do this, to be honest.
MW: It’s been two years since I suggested a documentary about the Sega Genesis game Marko or Marko’s Magic Football to you on Twitter, and you replied, “fukin hell”. So I was curious how soon I could expect that to be put out?
O’Dwyer: Marko’s Magic Football. Yes, I’m googling. This is Soccer Kid!
MW: So this game, I have no recollection of how I came into possession of it. It’s one of those games I just remember loving. When you were doing Guilty treasures for Giant Bomb I was like, “If Danny asked me to do guilty treasures, I would talk about Marko because nobody knows this fucking game.” I don’t even know how I got it. It was made by Domark, who became Eidos.
O’Dwyer: Okay, so Domark was bought by Eidos. So they were a UK team. I don’t want to pop your bubble on this, but there was a game called Soccer Kid that came out in 1993. It was made by Chrysalis, who were a pretty big developer in the UK. You should Google pictures of Soccer Kid. It looks like a version of this that had a higher budget. This game came out a year after Soccer Kid, so I think this is a clone. Which look, back in the fucking mid 90s, right? I was playing Great Giana Sisters, I wasn’t playing Super Mario. Altered Beast on the Genesis? I didn’t have that. I played Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga. So there was plenty of this happening. But to me, this looks like they made a Soccer Kid clone.
MW: You just took a treasured childhood memory and stomped all over it.
O’Dwyer: And especially because Soccer Kid and this game, Marko’s Magic Football are a weird concept. It’s a 2D platformer where you don’t have a gun, you don’t jump on people’s heads. You literally kick a football.
MW: Yeah, you kick football. You bounce on it. There’s a button you press to summon it. So if you got up on a platform, I think you hit C and it would bring it back to you.
O’Dwyer: Everything you’ve just said is also in Soccer Kid.
MW: That’s incredible.
O’Dwyer: I’m so sorry. I got to play it. I could be wrong about the dates, but it does look like it came out afterwards.
MW: Do you ever have those games that just kind of show up in your house when you’re a kid?
O’Dwyer: Oh yeah. It used to happen a lot more. Now we’re sort of previewed to hell about games. If anything, I think that’s why games like Balatro and and a lot of these indie overnight hits that come out of nowhere, like, I didn’t know anything about fucking Valheim. And then suddenly I played three months nonstop of Valheim. Or even Helldivers to a certain extent, even though that was a sequel. I think some of the most fun stuff is when there’s a game coming at that, you have no idea what it is, and suddenly people are saying, go play this thing, and then you’re like, “Oh, this is fucking crazy. Like, what is this? Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And you can do that one with these games that cost 15 bucks or ten bucks or maybe 20 bucks. You’ll take a risk. The reason we have all those previews is because people are spending 60 bucks, 70 bucks are like, “Well, I want to make sure I like this thing before I spend all that money.”
MW: Any closing thoughts, any messages that you’d like to send to the Hard drive Audience? Patreon.com/noclip? YouTube.com/noclip?
O’Dwyer: One of the things I really love about Hard Drive is that there is such a reaction to any cutting journalism out there, and I say that as somebody who, as an outsider, I don’t think the work that we do is not journalistic in nature necessarily. Sometimes we dip into those waters, but we have our hands full just trying to talk about the process and trying to be accurate and trying to preserve the history of it. But one of the things that really irks me about the reaction to a lot of modern games journalism is that there’s so much initial reactionary hatred to stuff. And there’s plenty of shit journalists out there in any field. I’m not saying everyone’s great at what they do, and there’s outlets out there that fuck up or that do it all the time. There’s outlets I don’t like and outlets I do like more than others. What I don’t like is when there’s really cutting criticisms of things that are pretty, you know, not black and white, but like pretty easy to see which way the wind is blowing or morally where we should maybe feel about these things, that there’s so much reaction to it. And one of the things I love about your publication is that it knows that. That’s the point. That’s part of it. We’re going to win you over. Similar to other satirical news outlets out there that like, we’re going to be extra smart about this, but we’re going to get you on our side by bringing you in, I guess, I’m making it fun. How do I best describe this? I guess, for whatever reason, it’s just the magic of a publication like yours is that it’s able to get around some of that stuff. I think that’s cool, and I’m not saying that other video game websites should use satire. That’s obviously not what they can do. One of the things I like about when I see your guys’ stuff shared around is that it’s usually in good faith. It seems to be. Which is pretty cool. It’s funny because it’s a way of getting people to care about things.
MW: Maybe thinking about it in a different way.
O’Dwyer: You’re putting a little bit of sugar on it. You lubing it up a little bit, you know what I mean? You’re making it easier to swallow or stick up your butt. I don’t know. Is this a suppository or a food analogy thing I’m doing? I’m not quite sure. I think what’s really cool about games coverage these days is there’s such diversity, not just in the types of people who are working at these places, but just in the ways we’re doing it. Which benefits everyone. We can run a thing like Noclip, which is pretty niche for what we do, but because we’re not like a weird outsider necessarily, there’s like all these different flavors of games, coverage. And I think that’s good for games. I think it’s good for getting people to give a shit more about games too. So yeah, it’s pretty cool, and I’m very flattered to be invited to talk.
