I'm just going to quickly go through the sponsors to acknowledge them.
If it weren't for them, we wouldn't be able to do this, especially in this great location.
So I'm going to go through that, and we're going to go right into the keynote.
So first I want to acknowledge the diamond sponsors, which is Fishline and SecureWorks.
The platinum sponsors, Portivity, Kohl's, and Nexum.
The gold sponsors are American Family Insurance, RSA, FireEye, Sickitch, I love that name.
Silver is Carbon Black, Sophos, Splunk, IE Mentor, and Exobeam.
The website is Below Zero Day.
Beverages tonight are compliments of Grimm, so make sure to say thank you to those guys.
Snacks as well, Nexum, both yesterday and today.
Educational, Illinois State University and University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Anyone?
The swag, Cinercom, Riverrun, and Concurrency.
And the prizes are the Sam's Institute, how do you say it, Exhibitor, I think?
Hack 5 and No Starch Press.
I did my best with that one.
So, without further ado, I would like to introduce the keynote.
Dan Lussen from Goat Store Publishing and Midwest Gaming Classic.
Hi everybody.
I'm a little bit taller, stay.
Alright, sorry, there we go.
Alright, so, I have to put down all my fun stuff here.
I don't have a video presentation, but I do have stuff to show.
Alright, so, I'm just going to do it this way right away.
So, hi everybody, my name is Dan Lussen, like was just mentioned.
And I am one of the two guys who owns an online website called the Goat Store.
Goat stands for Games of All Types.
It's kind of a funny name.
We were debating what to do with the name in the late 1990s.
And the name comes from... we both loved this game for the Atari Jaguar named Tempest 2000.
And the guy who programmed Tempest 2000, Jeff Minter, had a pet sheep.
And he would put the sheep in the games.
And so I thought that we would be really clever by naming it after something like the sheep shop.
And Gary, my partner, was like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Let's just name it usedvideogames.com.
Which we could have had.
But myself and my never-ending smartness said, no, no, no, let's do this like this.
We had a friend that said, all right, but it has to mean something.
And we sat there and he said, like, Goat could mean Games of All Something.
And so we were Games of All Something for a while.
And then we became Games of All Types.
And that's where the name comes from.
But we've kind of gone on this adventure for a long time.
The company started in about the year 2000 and has been growing and changing ever since then.
Now, the reason that I'm here isn't because I sell used video games online.
That would be a very silly reason to be here.
But because I've actually kind of fallen into being one of the people that has the most knowledge about video game hacking in the last probably 15 years.
And that's not me trying to sound like, yeah, I'm real awesome at this.
It more came out of necessity.
So to start this story, I need to go back to an event that I went to in 1999.
It was before the Goat Store actually started.
I was there with my friend Gary, who's the other guy who runs the Goat Store.
And another friend, Max, who has been my best friend since I've been about two.
And we had been collecting for the Atari Jaguar system.
It keeps popping back up.
And the Atari Jaguar had this weird thing.
It had a fan community that got together every year in a different location around the United States to celebrate the Atari Jaguar.
Now, why was that important?
Because number one, basically no one knew what the Jaguar was outside of this room.
So you had a few people.
It might be 50 people that would get together.
And if you walked up to someone and said, this is why I like Kasumi Ninja.
They wouldn't just look at you like you just grew a third eye.
They would actually know what you're talking about.
And so it was fun to get together with people like that.
And we had decided that we were going to go to this convention because we enjoyed collecting for the system.
At about the same time, Gary and I had been... the way that we met, we met at school first.
But then we didn't really know each other until one day in fifth grade.
I would stay after school because back at my school, Franklin Elementary in West Allis, we had Apple IIGSs in the room.
And school would end, and I had asked my teacher if I could stay after and program the Apple IIGSs.
I got myself programming books.
I figured the whole thing out.
And so I would rush as quickly as I could to make a game because in an hour I would have to leave.
And when you turned it off, it was gone.
So I would stay after school.
And one day, this other kid who I kind of knew through other events, Gary, walked up to me and said, what are you doing?
And I kind of explained, well, I'm making the computer do what I want it to do.
And he said, can you show me?
And I said, sure.
And so the two of us stayed probably four out of five days a week after school programming different things and just seeing what we could do.
We got it to the point that within an hour we could program stuff with rudimentary animation and games that were actually relatively fun.
And so we had this belief that, hey, you know what, in a few years we'll be a little bit older and we'll start our own publishing company.
Now, that seemed possible back then because video games were around the NES era and a couple people could make a game.
Of course, by the time that I was old enough, that type of thing had changed a lot.
But what happened then is that as we went through middle school and high school, we got into this Atari Jaguar scene.
It keeps looping back to that for now.
When we did, we came across this company.
The company's name... I'm not even going to bother with the company's name because it wasn't the best experience.
But they had put this stuff up online saying, hey, we are going to make new games for the Atari Jaguar system.
It's going to be amazing.
And all 200 people who cared were like, that is amazing.
And I started talking to this guy because I actually knew what went into programming.
I hadn't programmed on a console at that time, but was like, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
And so me and him had a vigorous debate through email back and forth where I was telling him, basically, you don't know what you're talking about.
And he was saying, no, I'm going to make this game.
It's going to be better than the N64.
And I was like, you can't.
That's not what the hardware is.
And he eventually said, okay, well, you think you're so smart, show me something that you can do.
And I said, all right, I will.
And so I had actually just recently had a computer crash.
I was a junior in high school at the time.
And so I found, I dug out an old computer game that Gary and I had made in eighth grade because we had kept programming.
And I sent him that.
And I said, there.
A couple days later, I got an email back that said, oh my God, you're right.
Can you work for us?
And I said, maybe.
And he said, I'll send you a development kit if you want for the Atari Lynx because we want to make a game for that too.
And I said, okay.
So we decided, yeah, we'll do this.
And so we started trying to program the Atari Lynx with little knowledge of assembler language and little knowledge of exactly what we wanted to do.
But the thing that happened with the Lynx is that it helped us to develop both the good and the bad of how independent publishing went.
The company that we were working for at the time, it was right before the big internet bubble.
And they would send me emails every so often that would say, hey, Dan, we need you guys to update your website.
And I was like, no, we need a product to sell.
We have no products to sell.
I'm not going to update the website every month with no products to sell.
And a couple weeks would pass and I would get another email, your website has not been updated.
It was like, yeah, I don't have products to sell.
All of a sudden our website was gone and I wasn't getting any more answers from them.
Turns out they got multiple millions of dollars of investment because the investors were just curious on if they could make a website look pretty.
And we basically had been booted out because we were focused on products.
Now the way that the story goes is that the Goat Store still exists.
That company went bankrupt multiple times and has completely dissolved now.
And by the way, zero products for them still.
So I feel like I won that one, that yes, products was better than just making a pretty website, but I also never got a million dollars worth of investment.
So I guess that there's that.
Regardless, when we started the Goat Store, what happened was we had this inventory that we had bought.
Because, like I said, I was really focused on having something that they could buy.
Why would people keep coming to check in on my game that we were making if there wasn't another reason to go there?
So we bought some Atari Lynx stuff that we could sell online.
With full assurances, of course, that the company was going to pay us back for it, which never happened.
So Gary and I, at this point, after we kind of got unceremoniously booted from the company, were like...
Well, and actually, we said, hey, we're done with this.
We wrote them a letter saying that.
So we kept the development kit in lieu of any payments that they were supposed to make to us, which was fine by me.
But anyway, we, at that point, had about $2,500 worth of Atari Lynx games.
We were still high schoolers.
I could have bought a lot of cool stuff in high school for $2,500.
That wasn't just tons of Lynx inventory.
And so we said, well, what are we going to do with this?
And we decided at that point to start The Goat Store.
So that gives a little bit of the background about some of the stuff that I learned about publishers that I didn't really like beforehand.
And when we started The Goat Store, Gary and I weren't really set on publishing.
The next thing that happens is that we went to this Jaguar Festival, like I said.
It was actually called Jagfest, which it moved around the country every year.
And so in 2001, we said, hey, if you'd like a place, we'll hold it here in Milwaukee.
And everybody said, sure.
So we held it at the basement of the Boy Scout Service Center, basically just down the road here.
And when we did, we actually brought in over 100 people for it, which was the largest Atari Jaguar Festival.
Because to me, Jagfest just sounds wrong.
Largest Atari Jaguar Festival that had ever happened.
And so we had people that flew in from Japan.
We had people that flew in from around the country.
The thing that was crazy about this event was that almost no one was actually local.
And so that event happened, and we were like, man, that was a blast.
We should continue the show.
And so the next year, we said, we're going to do this again, but the Atari Jaguar Festival always moves locations every year.
And the next year, it was scheduled to be in St.
Louis.
So we can't be like, hey, we're going to do Jagfest again, because no one would want to come to that.
So we decided to hold a naming competition, and a young person at the time known as Benjamin Heckendorn, now known as Ben Heck, some of you may have heard of him because of his hacking adventures, had decided that we should name it the Midwest Classic.
And we said, cool, that's a cool idea.
So we held it again the second year.
We had about 100 people the second year, again.
It was a very small gathering.
And it was a lot of fun.
At that event, we had people who brought in a Dreamcast demo disc.
And that's what really started us on the path to publishing our own games, and the way that I learned all this random information about hacking video game consoles.
The disc that they gave us out there, it was just called the Midwest Gaming Classic Demo Disc.
And they gave that disc to whoever would take one, basically.
They made about 100 copies, and I remember them handing me one at the end, and saying, we really want you to have this.
And I was like, cool.
And I remember I took it, and I put it in a box, and I took it home.
The same friend who actually named the goat store for us, his name is Max, about two weeks after the convention was over, gives me a call.
And he says, did you look at that Dreamcast disc?
And I said, no.
I said, I figure it's kind of like 2600 games, but on the Dreamcast.
And he's like, that's all right.
He said, no, you don't understand.
It's incredible.
It's like commercial games on the Dreamcast.
You should check it out.
And so I popped the disc in to my Dreamcast that night, turned it on, and was blown away.
The demos that were done in the system were literally good enough to be commercial releases.
And right now, it was 2002.
The Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.
So it was less than a year after the Dreamcast had gone off the market.
A lot of these developments were done during the life of the Dreamcast.
And so I talked to Gary afterwards and said, you have to check out this disc, too.
And he had the same response as me.
What's actually on it?
Is it going to be any good?
I was like, you will be blown away.
And he was, too.
So he took that disc, and he, once he did that, he took it, I'm sorry, we took that disc, and we contacted the developers that were on it.
And we said, hey, guys, what you have developed is worthy of publication.
And if you'd like to work with someone, we would like to work with you to publish this.
And the person who we were talking to with one of the groups that had made a game demo called Feet of Fury, it's a Dance Dance Revolution style game that was made at basically the beginning of the Dance Dance Revolution style of gameplay.
Only a few DDR games had been out before that point.
He was also the one that had made the system.
It's called Kalios, I just know it by chaos, so I never know how to pronounce it the right way.
But Kalios was the system that Dan Potter had developed, which is a homebrew independent, and I actually don't like the word homebrew, I'll get to that in a bit.
But it was an independently developed thing where he figured out how to hack into the Dreamcast backend, made a library so that people could program their own independent games onto the Dreamcast, and then publish it for free for the world.
So, really important guy to the scene.
Also important because when we're going to publish a game using this OS, it's good to have the guy that wrote the OS as the one publishing it.
Because doing this for the first time, it was the first Dreamcast game that was going to be published post the Dreamcast's death in the United States.
It was great to have the guy that had made the system say, alright, so here's the game that I made with my own stuff, and I'm of course happy to have them do it.
And so we published this game, and I had read up on some of the court cases and stuff like that that dictated what you could and couldn't do for video games before that point.
But when we made this game, the company that we made it with just was like, cool, we'll press it.
And so they took it, and they pressed it.
Looks something like this.
Yay!
So, this was the first game that we did.
Cryptic Illusion is the name of the company that we worked with to do it.
And we published it.
Now, when we published it, and I think it's still a really cool game.
It came out in 2003 at the Midwest Classic that year, actually.
We flew in the guys behind us.
And they made it so that you can use a dance pad for it, which are only in Japan.
You can also use a controller.
And then there's a mode in it called Typing of Fury, where if you hook up a keyboard to the Dreamcast, you can type in time with the music.
So it's got a lot of different modes in it and stuff like that.
It's a really great game.
In fact, there's some belief that Konami, which does Dance Dance Revolution, saw this game.
Both because we had a sales record going to Konami headquarters of the game.
And because about a year later, there was a game that they published where they had an award that you could get.
And they called the award Feet of Fury.
And they had an arrow that looked exactly like ours.
So, I don't know that it was actually us, but it seems a little bit of a nice coincidence.
Regardless, we talked with the Cryptic Illusion guys, and at first they were like, eh.
But eventually they said, yeah, let's do this.
And so in making this game, this one wasn't that hard.
So we decided this is really cool.
We want to keep doing this.
And so that next year we said, alright, we're going to hold a coding competition.
And so we held a competition online.
Excuse me.
We held a competition online where we said, we want you to make a brand new game for the Dreamcast.
We want it to be awesome.
And the winning game, the best game that we get, we will publish.
And so we got five entries.
Two of which that I'm really glad that we didn't have to publish because they were not really games.
One of which was okay, but needed a lot of polish.
And then two of which that were really good.
And we said, awesome.
And we decided, you know what, we're going to contact the two people that made these games that are really good and say, hey, do you want to publish both of them?
And so we did that.
And those two games are called Inhabitants and Machupai.
And they look like this.
Now, the thing about these two games is that I got these cases about a year before we were actually able to release the games.
And that's where the background and figuring out all the legalities of console hacking comes in.
When we got these disks and we sent the same company that we had used our game disk and we said, here you go, please make us enough copies of each of these.
And they said, sure.
But before we do, we need to tell you something.
Okay, what?
Well, we're not sure that we can do this.
The Dreamcast seems to have this really weird file system.
We're not sure if we can press it right.
Okay.
Thought really nothing of it because guess what?
They had done it before.
So it worked.
There's not going to be an issue with this.
Sent them the disks.
Pressed them.
Got a thousand copies of the games.
Took them out.
Put a game in the Dreamcast after we had had pre-sales open.
Turned on the Dreamcast.
Nothing.
A little shocking.
Okay, well, maybe that disk is bad.
Pull out the next disk.
Put it in the Dreamcast.
Turn it on.
Nothing.
The Dreamcast is showing the question mark with the disk on it.
And it was like, uh-oh.
Pulled out the other game.
Did the same thing.
We had thousands of games that were not working in any way.
And so, first we had to tell everybody, so, yeah, we have your money for these games.
They're not working.
We'll repress them.
We'll get them back to you as soon as we can.
And so we did that.
Or so we thought.
Well, you did that in the way of the email.
We thought that it would be quick.
The problem was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act had come out in the meantime and made it potentially questionable on what we were doing, if it was legal or not.
And so the Digital Millennium Copyright Act basically allows content creators, in this case it would have been Sega, to go after the people that produced the discs.
Not me, not the Goat Store, but the actual company that had produced the disc.
And so because of that, everybody was like, Well, wait.
We are not sure that what you are doing is legal.
And because of that, we can't take the risk to produce your game.
And so I started really researching.
I had done, like I said, some research on it, but I started really researching what had all gone into the legal decisions and the legal things that had happened with video games.
And so the kind of quick history of that is that the first one was in 1980.
Some people at Atari were angry that Atari, number one, you wrote an awesome game.
It sold a million copies.
You got your, like, $20,000 wage and that was it.
They didn't really like that.
Second thing that they didn't really like at Atari, they were told, like, you know, this is what your project is.
Didn't really have much choice.
So some people broke off to form a company called Activision.
And when Activision got formed, they said, All right, we are going to make our own games.
And they started making their own games.
And Atari, of course, came and said, Uh-uh-uh, this is our console.
You can't make games for it.
And that matter went to court.
And that was settled in court.
And it said, you know what, Atari?
You used all off-the-shelf parts.
So they didn't do anything.
They used all off-the-shelf parts.
They are not doing anything to your IP.
They can make these games for it.
No problem.
Now, this was great for Activision.
And really terrible for Atari.
Part of the reason that Atari, and if you don't know about the great video game crash in 1983, a big part of the reason that that happened was because so many companies flooded the market with games that were barely games.
Like, oh, hey, I can make the Atari show up a picture of a spaceship.
Good enough.
Ship it.
And people were like, well, but it's just a spaceship.
So what?
People will buy it for $20.
We'll list it for $20.
People will buy it.
And so Atari, who had, for the most part, until this point, tried really keeping their games of a high quality.
Well, it didn't really matter because all their games were getting undercut by other things.
And when you looked at it, a picture of a spaceship on someone else's game versus a picture of a spaceship on an Atari game kind of looked the same.
Besides that, Activision games were known for being better than Atari games for a while.
So who cares about what it says on the box?
It's probably going to be awesome.
Let's go buy that game.
And then Atari also kind of didn't do the best in some of their games.
Some of their games were just not up to the standards that people had expected.
And so it also eroded the support in them.
And so the industry crashed in large part because of that.
Another thing that happened in 1982, Atari decided to try to sue Coleco.
Coleco created an expansion port for their ColecoVision system where you would plug in...
It's hard to explain.
I have one downstairs at the table today.
But it's like a large cartridge adapter thing that you plugged into it.
It would have new adapters where you could plug in more controllers.
And you could then play Atari 2600 games on the ColecoVision.
Atari didn't like this either.
Took Coleco to court.
That one got settled out of court before the lawsuit actually went through.
And what happened in that one was basically Atari knew that legally they weren't going to win.
So they also knew though that they could cost Coleco some money.
So they said, hey, let's come together and you give us a licensing fee for this and we'll just say fine.
And so Coleco agreed to that.
But it was pretty clear that Atari was going to lose that one too if it had actually gone to court.
For about the next 10 years there wasn't any huge video game court cases that had happened.
But then in 1992 we come across two ones that are super important to where we can be at now.
The first one was Nintendo decided to sue the company Tenjin.
If you know your Nintendo games, the Tenjin carts are the black carts that they have.
And the reason that Nintendo decided to sue Tenjin, and if I say Atari I apologize because Tenjin is actually Atari's other name that they were using at the time, was because Nintendo had decided to learn from the 2600 problem of we don't have a way to protect our copyright.
And they put in a chip that would lock out games that weren't legitimate games.
So this game would be started and the game would check for this chip.
It would basically handshake with the chip and say, yep, you're a legit Nintendo game, you can run.
And if you put in something else and that chip saw it and it would say, nope, you're not real, you can't run.
Well, what Tenjin did is that they said, basically, well, this isn't fair, we want to do our own games.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell the court system that we're in a lawsuit with Nintendo and then we're going to get the rights for the chip.
I'm sorry, not the rights, the blueprints for the chip.
So they illegally got the rights for the blueprint for the chip, the 10 NES chip, from the court system.
Turns out this is not a legal way to hack a system.
You cannot go to the court system, lie to them, get the copyrights, and then make your own chips.
And so Atari was sued by Nintendo and had to return some of their merchandise and other things like that happened.
And it was a pretty pivotal moment.
But it was also interesting that in this moment, the only thing that was noted as being wrong was the fact that Atari had stolen illegally the copyrights.
That same year, Accolade and Sega went to court.
And the reason why was that Accolade had figured out a similar thing with the Sega Genesis.
So you'd plug in your game to the Sega Genesis, turn it on, and it would start playing.
Sega decided that they would get really smart with this.
Oh, and by the way, Accolade had completely legally reversed the system.
They put games in, figured out what code kept being fed at the right time to the right chip, and said, that's what we're going to put in our games, that's what must unlock the system.
And they were right.
So Sega was like, alright, we got this.
What we're going to do is we're going to make a new version of the console.
And in the console will be a chip that when you turn it on, it will say, this software under-licensed by Sega.
And then when we turn on an Accolade game and it says this is under-licensed by Sega, we will sue them and say, no it is not.
And so that's exactly what they did.
Accolade's games, all of a sudden you would buy a new Sega Genesis console, turn on the Sega Genesis console.
I do that because it was with the first bigger consoles.
It only works with some of them.
You would turn that on, it would say this software is under-licensed by Sega, and then it would be an Accolade game that was not.
Sega sued them for, I believe it was false advertising.
Because, no, this isn't right.
Went to court.
Accolade argued in court, look, we reverse-engineered this legally.
They did this afterwards because we reverse-engineered this legally.
And that's not cool.
We don't want to be representing this, but we found the right back door.
They shouldn't get to change it.
And what was interesting is that court case, Accolade won.
And it was said to Sega, like, no, you are actually misrepresenting them.
Because their games worked on your systems before you did this.
So you can't do that.
And so, those were four really important cases.
And then again, about ten years passes.
And the last really important case was with Bleem.
And Bleem was a system where you could plug it into either your PC, or they also made ones for the Dreamcast called Bleemcast, and it would allow you to play PlayStation games, the original PlayStation games, on whatever system it was.
Sony decided that they didn't like this.
Interestingly, Sega did not sue over this being on the Dreamcast, but Sony sued Bleem, the company behind this, over this.
What happened in this court case was that Bleem kept winning.
So what does a large company do when the small company keeps winning?
Keep suing you until you're out of money.
And so that's exactly what Sony did.
Sony sued Bleem over and over and over again about different things, and found out, oh hey, turns out that what they're doing is legal, but we can run them out of money.
And so that's exactly what happened.
They ran them out of money, and after a few years, they had to sell off all of their supplies and all of their stuff, and it ended.
That was right before we had started production.
And so I had a very difficult time explaining all of that to the CD manufacturers who were just like, yeah, but if they sue us, we're in trouble.
The last manufacturer that I talked with said to me, well, we're going to do some checking, and if everything checks out, we'll make these games for you.
And it was literally like it was almost a year later, so I felt terrible.
We had these games that were done, and I couldn't figure out a way to physically produce them.
I felt like I had been betraying the people that had bought them, the developers and everything else.
And luckily, this group came through.
They said, yep, we've reviewed everything.
Everything makes sense that you're saying.
And so we got new discs, and Gary and I opened up every one of those thousands of copies of games, replaced the discs, put them back together, and have been, well, selling them ever since.
So that's not where our story ends.
We've done a few others.
There's a game, and this game is actually at my table downstairs, or our table downstairs.
It's a game called Cool Herders that we have.
This game was made...
Excuse me.
It's basically like, if you know Bomberman, it's like Bomberman, except you collect sheep and try to blow each other up.
So it's a little bit different, but I think it's a lot of fun.
It's also the only game that I actually have developer credits on.
I wrote one of the stories to it.
And so each of these games, by the way, was made by a different group.
This one was made by Harmless Lion Games, and the developers that we work with are all independent people.
I had a person in the industry once actually tell me...
Our first game, Feed of Fury, we had called it Homebrew.
And I had a call from someone in the industry who I had kind of known, and he said to me, why would you call this a homebrew game?
And I said, well, because we made it.
And he said, but no, no, no.
He said, a homebrew game is something you do in your basement all by yourself.
He said, you actually have this physically produced, physically everything?
This is an independent release.
And so ever since then, we've referred to our games as independent releases.
We've worked with different people for all of them.
We have, and I forgot to bring it with me, another release called Iridesce.
Now, before Iridesce, Master of Blocks, came out, we had announced at the show, now called the Midwest Gaming Classic, next weekend, by the way, if you're in town, at the Midwest Gaming Classic, we had announced
that we had been working with 10 different developers on new projects.
And that was a really dumb thing to do, because we hadn't signed contracts with them.
The way that Gary and I worked was that we wanted the developers to feel comfortable with us, bringing us their games and saying, And so we built stuff into our contracts that was pretty strange.
Like, for instance, a developer for one of our games can at any time buy back their rights for their game at very low cost.
We did that because we had some people that were working on games that, for instance, Cool Herders was actually purchased by a company to be made into a Nintendo DS release.
And we said, if that company wants us to be exclusive, we will forfeit our rights to the game for you for basically the cost of production.
And we did that because we really wanted to be nice to the developers.
But what happened when we announced these 10 games is that suddenly other people went, Hey, this whole Dreamcast production thing sounds pretty easy.
Sounds pretty nice.
So suddenly we had competition.
One of the things that we did with our games is that all of our releases, they sort of resemble a Dreamcast game.
If you know your Dreamcast games, the Dreamcast games at the end have the same black kind of arch curve to them.
But they say Dreamcast on them.
And other than that, we made it all our own.
We wanted to be very different than Pirates.
Part of the reason that the Dreamcast isn't with us, well, I was going to say isn't with us today, but that doesn't make sense.
Part of the reason that it died early is that the Dreamcast was very easy to pirate.
It's also the reason that we were able to make these games.
They left a backdoor in the system that was discovered called the MIL-CD compatibility, which meant that they thought they were being real smart.
Developers could make a game, put it on a CD-R, send it to people, let those people test it on any Dreamcast game.
They wouldn't have to pay $1,000, $1,500, or whatever it was, thousands of dollars.
For a development kit, you can just buy a stock Dreamcast for $300 and throw it on your Dreamcast and play it.
The problem was that once we figured out how to hack it, you can make any game into a MIL-CD game, including games that were already released.
So it was kind of a downfall of the system.
But we had other developers who came on and...
I don't really mind competition with it.
I mean, we spent a lot of money trying to figure out the whole legal part between inhabitants and Machupai's production and everything else, so much so that we've never made a dime off of our publishing.
But the other developers, the thing that disappointed me is that a lot of them made their games look exactly like retail Dreamcast releases.
And so while our releases, I'm very proud of them, I've always wished that those other developers wouldn't have made them look exactly like regular releases.
I like the fact that our releases stand on their own and say, yes, this is an independent game and I'm proud of this, instead of, hey, I was released by Sega, no I wasn't!
Which is kind of how some of the other ones work.
A couple other things real quick.
I don't know how I'm doing on time.
How am I doing on time?
Oh, not bad.
A couple other things real quick.
So we've worked with some other things.
Going back to the Atari Jaguar again for a second.
A few years ago we worked with the same group that made Cool Herders and we developed this.
Actually, he had already developed this, we just produced it for him.
This is a skunk board for the Atari Jaguar, named after one of the hardware engineers for it.
The skunk board is a flash board for the Atari Jaguar that was meant for Jaguar development.
The Atari Jaguar still has an extremely strong homebrew scene.
And the homebrew scene that the Jaguar has, it has this problem where if you're going to make a physical cart, it's going to be like $50.
And so we made this, it was about $130 at release, and you could plug it in, you could load up a game on it, you could play a game on whatever system you had as a stock system.
And so if you made like a, oh hey, I'm just going to make a fun Space Invaders clone and give it out for free, you didn't have to pay $50 to actually play it, you could just use this.
And so this was kind of a neat thing that we did since then.
So, oh, and then right now we're in production, and it's again kind of in production hell, of a game called Slave, or J.
Townsend's Slave.
Slave is about, it's supposed to be like if you've ever played Robotron from the arcade, it's supposed to be Robotron in a 3D environment, like a Doom-style environment.
And we announced that game almost two years, well, about a year and a half ago now.
The day that we announced it, we had decided after Machupai and Inhabitants that we will never announce a pre-sale for a game until we have it done and it's running, because that was a mess.
And so of course that doesn't work, because life.
So we announced J.
Townsend's Slave.
Excuse me.
We announced J.
Townsend's Slave, we started taking pre-orders on it, because we had the game running perfectly in emulation.
Produce an actual disc of it, turn it on, and it RAM overflows all the time.
And we're not sure why the emulator is totally cool with it, but it's not.
We have gone back and forth and it eventually ended up being a complete engine rewrite.
If anybody's, I doubt that many people in here, if any people in here are actually following the saga of J.
Townsend's Slave online, but the short version is, it's been very frustrating both for us and for other people, because the game itself is in the can, but the engine that runs the game had to be completely rewritten from the ground up so that it would work right.
And when you're updating people that have pre-ordered, and you're basically like, yeah, we got the engine closer to working.
They want to hear like, we just added 10 more levels.
But that part of it's all done.
And so the good news is that I now have demo copies of Slave that have literally just shown up within the last 24 hours in my inbox.
And so I'm able to finally, hopefully get that thing published within the next couple months, I hope.
But it's kind of an interesting thing.
Now, there are some really big positives to developing for an old console, and specifically the Dreamcast.
The Dreamcast was the last production console, so home console, that you would go to a store and buy.
The most advanced one that had commercial independent releases for it.
By that, I mean that you can get homebrew things for your PlayStation Portable, or your Nintendo 3DS, or even the Wii U, but those don't have physical releases that people have made.
And there's a big benefit to being forced to make a physical release.
It shows, as a developer, that you can finish a product.
That's one of the problems, as I'm sure that many of us know, with the...
That's one of the problems with the industry today, is that a lot of the times, they will release a game, and they know, like, oh, hey, this kind of stinks, but we'll fix it in patches.
Dreamcast doesn't have the ability to do that.
In fact, we found one bug in Feet of Fury, about two years after we made it, where there's this money thing that you can do to buy upgrades and art unlocks and stuff like that, and we found out that if you spend a certain amount of money and have no money left,
it'll suddenly put you at infinite money instead of running you out of money.
So that was a nice bonus for people, but, like, we can't go back and fix that.
I can't push a patch to that that says, hey, this is done.
And so, as a developer, it proves that you can actually use these for...
Like, you can actually finish a product.
And what's amazing is that a lot of our developers have gone on to jobs that... and they've told me, personally, that our developments or our publishing was the key for them getting their job.
The person who did Cool Herders is currently a Walt Disney World Imagineer, or Walt Disney Imagineer.
He was integral in the production of the Shanghai Disneyland Park.
In fact, I emailed him about, I don't know, probably about a year and a half ago now, and when I did, I had just said, hey, you know, I need to send you something.
And he said, if you can wait for, like, a year or so, I'm in Shanghai.
And I was like, what?
And he said, oh, yeah, I'm working for Disney Imagineering now.
They flew me out here and they're putting me up for a year and a half so I can build this park.
And I was like, that's awesome.
And he said, yeah, you know, showing that I could finish a game all the way through was a huge part of that.
The developer behind Iridesse, Master of Blocks, told me that it was his key piece in his portfolio when he was hired to be a system engineer for Pixar.
And so every Pixar movie that I go to, I sit there and I go, there's Florian!
Before I leave, because it's kind of cool to me that I somehow had this weird part of a hand in this.
I wasn't the one doing the actual software development, but I like the fact that I was able to help get people to that point.
So those are some of the positives.
The negatives, though, there are some of those, too.
The first is that you're not going to get rich if you ever decide to do this.
Dreamcast games at this point, it's not like I'm going to make cool herders and sell 10,000 of them or 20,000 of them.
There's just not that much interest.
In fact, our most recent release, Jade Townsend's Slave, we're making a grand total of 484 copies of it.
And that will be it.
And so with 484 copies, even if we're getting $20 apiece, it's like $8,000 total.
Production comes out of that, all these other costs come out of that.
And when you really look at how much time you're spending developing it and creating it and testing it, you're not in a money-making endeavor.
And so why do it?
Well, for the developers, like I said, I think it's a really good experience.
For my case, Gary and I, when we were little and we were programming those Apple IIgs, we said, someday we want to be someone who makes games.
And this has given us the opportunity to do that.
I also selfishly hope that when you go to, or when someone goes to buy Feet of Fury or Cool Herders or Jade Townsend's Slave or whatever game we have, they go, hey, while I'm here, I'm going to pick up these three Dreamcast games and a system and this and then.
That's the way that we theoretically will make some money on it.
And when I say some money, I'm a teacher in my regular life.
So it's not like I'm making much money off of the Goat Store or anything like that, but I have fun doing it.
And that's kind of the whole thing with this, is that it's been a fun project the whole way through.
It's been interesting to have learned all these different things against all the different backgrounds and all of the different games.
And it's fascinating because more and more we're seeing more and more older game developments happen.
So like I had mentioned, I'm one of the guys behind the Midwest Gaming Classic that happens next weekend out in Brookfield.
And when I'm at that show and I'm walking around, I'm talking to different people, it's amazing how many new releases they have for different old systems.
The Dreamcast doesn't have that many happening for it.
But again, part of that is because it's so advanced.
The Dreamcast is advanced enough that if you're going to make a good game for the Dreamcast that holds up against the commercial games that were released, it's not like you're going to make them in a couple weeks or even a couple months.
It's going to be a couple years of really dedicating yourself to making this.
But there's new games, there's hundreds of new games for the Atari 2600.
There's hundreds of new games for the Nintendo system.
In fact, a couple years ago at the show, I guess six years ago now, I was given this at the show from some developers that had been showing off Nintendo games there.
So this is a cart that has six different homebrew Nintendo games for the original Nintendo on it.
I've heard a stat recently that within the last ten years, more than 500 brand new original NES games have come out by developers who made them underground.
And so it's interesting to see all the different interests that there is in doing this and figuring out how to get back into those systems and figuring out what to do.
It's also interesting that there's another side of that that has to do with hardware.
There are people that are fascinated by opening up the old systems and adding things to them that weren't originally there.
Component video.
I was talking with one of the guys who was at our table who was talking about how he replaced the RAM in his ColecoVision because it's the wrong voltage.
Which I had heard about that, but I had never heard anybody do it.
And he was telling me about how much better that makes the power supply issue with that system work.
And so it's fascinating all the things that we keep discovering about these old consoles.
So with that, let's see here, what time am I at?
Alright, cool.
So I have just a little bit of time.
I don't know if anybody has any questions or anything like that.
I hope that I was at least semi-entertaining.
I don't think that anybody's asleep, so I'll take that as a win.
Does anybody have any questions about any of this stuff that I can answer?
Yes.
Great question.
His question, if you didn't hear it, was can anybody play these games?
Or do you need to buy a modified Dreamcast for it?
So the short answer is anybody can buy this game.
It works in any Dreamcast system.
The slightly longer answer is that Sega said at the end of their life that they had made a new console that would not play MIL-CD games anymore.
And they did this because it would stop piracy from happening.
And it was very well published.
In fact, if you look up Sega Dreamcast systems that will play MIL-CD games, you will find a bunch of information online saying that these are all the consoles that will, and after this manufacturing date, it will not.
That's a big lie.
Every Dreamcast plays MIL-CD games because they would need to have changed the BIOS of the system to not accept audio CDs also.
And so I have not seen that done.
As a matter of fact, when we did both Feed of Fury and actually all of our games on the back have a warning that says, you need a MIL-CD game.
Feed of Fury works on any MIL-CD compatible Dreamcast.
October 2000 and earlier.
And supports the VGA, blah, blah, blah.
So the thing is that Sega said that they did this.
They never actually did.
Because it would have blocked audio CDs.
A lot of people still believe that.
I actually said at one point, I put out on a bunch of different message boards, because there were so many people that were like, well, I have a Dreamcast that won't work with this.
And so I said, I will give anybody that gets a Dreamcast that will legitimately not work with this, not because it's broken, but because of something else with the MIL-CD, I'll give you $500 if you can find me one, because I want to see what one is, and I want to test this.
And I put that on a lot of different places.
I had a lot of people tell me, oh, I got one for you.
Never had any appear.
The Goat Store itself has had more than 200 Dreamcasts come through our hands in the last 17 years.
We've never seen one either.
So it was kind of a neat trick that they tried doing, but yes, they'll work in anything.
You can buy them at GoatStore.com, or if you go to the Midwest Gaming Classic next weekend, I'm sure that we'll have some on the table there, because we do that also.
I will say that Goat Store, depending on how my partner has done, was supposed to be closed down earlier this week, because we're kind of crazy running the show this next weekend.
So if it's closed, wait about 10 days, and then go check it again if you're interested.
You can also try most of the games downstairs, because I have them with me.
So you can see me afterwards and be like, okay, so that Feet of Fury game sounded terrible, can I play it?
Or that Feet of Fury game sounded awesome, can I play it?
And I'll say yes.
And then you can discover that it's actually great, or terrible, or whatever you think of it at that time.
Anything else?
Yes.
That's a great question.
So he asked why we never went for something that was more PC.
And the simple answer to that is that Goat Store, when we made it, sold retro video games.
And so part of our reason of selling retro video games was that the market, when you go to buy a brand new video game system, if I was to buy, say, Xbox One games and list them on my website, there's this huge problem with, well, okay, I'll use Halo Wars as an example.
The weekend that Halo Wars 2 came out for the Xbox One, I found it somewhere for $35.
I didn't buy it yet.
I probably will eventually, but I have no time for games until my convention's over.
But if I bought those games at a wholesale price of, let's say, $50, at $35, I would lose my shirt.
And I could do that very quickly on a lot of games.
The retro market has a much more solid base about what game values are.
Because we were going for a retro market, PC games are... they have the issue of they don't really retain value.
And so it's hard to say, like, you know, hey, I've got this great, awesome copy of Seventh Guest still in the box.
Well, how much is that worth?
Eh, $5.
So now some of them have changed since then, but trying to actually...
And again, I'm not trying to make, like, tons of money off of anything that I do because it's more of just a fun hobby, but trying to not lose my shirt on all those games made it so that we weren't in the PC business.
We did tell the developers that they would have all rights to do it as PC games if they wanted to, and most of them decided to keep things console exclusive.
There was actually an iPhone version of Iridesce that came out, and Iridesce is no longer on the iPhone store, sadly, because it was right as I got an iPad that I was like, yes, I get to download this, went there, and was like, oh, it's gone.
But yeah, that's kind of why.
And the connections that I've had have all been made actually since I've started this by just other people hearing about stuff.
So it's kind of been amazing how so much of the community has come together and said, like, this is cool, and then talked to me about more stuff.
So it wasn't just like I knew people in the industry, because when I got into this in 2001, I didn't know anybody.
But, like, Jeff Minter, the guy that inspired us to name the store, he did email us about, I don't know, about a few weeks later.
And the goat that we have as our logo, who's also on my shirt, his name's Copper.
He's Jeff Minter's friend's goat.
Because he found us and he said, oh my god, I saw your store online.
It's hilarious.
I would like to submit to you a picture of a goat that you can use.
And this goat actually voice acted in a video game.
And when you start up our video games, it's actually that goat talking, because Jeff Minter did that for us.
So it's kind of crazy how our connections worked and met more people like that.
What time do I have?
Anybody else?
Cool.
Well, thank you very much for having me here.
I really appreciate it.
I hope that you learned a little bit something about some of these crazy releases and all this.
It's been an adventure.
And to just kind of sum it up, I will say that it's one of those things where when I started this adventure with, I guess with Gary, and I don't think either of us even knew that we were starting an adventure with each other.
When we started this, neither of us ever believed that we would be at a point that we would have this stuff happen to us.
And it was so cool that we've had all this stuff where it's just like pieces have fallen together.
And again, it has not been about making money.
If it was about making money, I guarantee you I could have made more money with a second job at McDonald's.
But this was about having fun and supporting people that made something really, really unique and cool and something that we wanted to share with the world.
And so I'm glad that I got to share that with the world and with you today.
Thank you.
So before our next talk, we're going to do a quick video from our badge makers that discusses a little bit about the game included in your badge.
So we have a little video that we'll be playing.
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