Speaker 1: Ephemeral is a production of My Heart three D audio
Speaker 1: for full exposure, listen What's that phones. This month on Ephemeral,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about the evolution of video games, dating
Speaker 1: back to the simple beginnings of Pown and Space Invaders,
Speaker 1: all the way up to the supercomputers that power our
Speaker 1: imaginations today. But in today's episode, we wanted to focus
Speaker 1: on the world's inside those video games. Video games can
Speaker 1: remove us from reality and place us in a magical
Speaker 1: and surreal world. But given the ephemeral nature of video
Speaker 1: games saves all of this wonder, amazement, and experience can
Speaker 1: be gone in the blink of an eye, leaving this
Speaker 1: world to exist only in our memories. I could probably
Speaker 1: give you a story about me being involved in like
Speaker 1: a lost save file from pretty much any time period
Speaker 1: of my life. My name is Matt Davidson, and my
Speaker 1: qualifications as a video gamer, I would say are pretty
Speaker 1: extensive just because of the generation I come from. So
Speaker 1: I was born in which puts me right in the
Speaker 1: middle of original Nintendo era, and I stuck with it
Speaker 1: enough through current times to where I played every different
Speaker 1: era of video games on pretty much every different console
Speaker 1: at one time or another. It wasn't necessarily me losing
Speaker 1: a save file, but I played the Diablo series, so
Speaker 1: both in Diablo Too and Diablo three, there's a mode
Speaker 1: that you can elect to play called Hardcore Mode. In
Speaker 1: Hardcore Mode, you agree at the beginning that if you die,
Speaker 1: all your progress is lost, and what it does is
Speaker 1: it resets you from zero, no matter how many hours
Speaker 1: you've sunk into this character. The ones that really hurt
Speaker 1: the most were when you would lose internet connection and
Speaker 1: then you would log back in and your character was
Speaker 1: dead and deleted. Right. So I had a few characters,
Speaker 1: one in particular that probably had close to five or
Speaker 1: six hundred hours of playtime just playing a very pedestrian
Speaker 1: part of the game, and my internet cut out when
Speaker 1: I got back on that character had died to some
Speaker 1: you know, trash mob. I went through this period where
Speaker 1: I actually had to stop playing the game for like
Speaker 1: three months because it's like when a dog dies and
Speaker 1: you like can't get another dog for like for a
Speaker 1: few months because it's too painful. Like I uninstalled the game,
Speaker 1: I had to completely walk away. I eventually did come
Speaker 1: back to the game. I went through the whole process
Speaker 1: again and lost another character and then I just had
Speaker 1: to stop. I couldn't take the pain anymore. I guess,
Speaker 1: like the funniest thing about it is like, it's so
Speaker 1: painful to you, but anybody that doesn't play games, like
Speaker 1: your significant other, like, has no idea how painful it is.
Speaker 1: And my wife is just kind of like bewildered why
Speaker 1: I was so upset If I'm talking to somebody that
Speaker 1: doesn't play video games. I'm almost a little embarrassed to
Speaker 1: tell the story because a the number of hours I
Speaker 1: sunk into playing a video game and be I sort
Speaker 1: of set myself up for that, right, Like if you
Speaker 1: play high stakes like that, you're gonna lose at some point.
Speaker 1: I almost feel foolish for thinking that I was gonna
Speaker 1: be able to, you know, ride the lightning forever and
Speaker 1: never have a fault. Somebody would call and my mom
Speaker 1: would be on the phone for like half an hour,
Speaker 1: and I'm sitting there, like, Mom, I thought my carriages die. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Chandler. Have been playing video games pretty much
Speaker 1: on my wife. That's the I started playing card games,
Speaker 1: and then I guess in my later twenties I got
Speaker 1: very good at it, and I guess my biggest claim
Speaker 1: to family is I got Top one hundred and Magic
Speaker 1: to Gathering and her Stone and soon to be the
Speaker 1: new You gear game. So you're good at video games,
Speaker 1: card games, I've got a card games. Back in middle school,
Speaker 1: there was a game called Rinscap and Rindscape was like
Speaker 1: one of the first like MMO games where you could
Speaker 1: go in and interact with other people. But that was
Speaker 1: back in the time of dial up. It was pretty
Speaker 1: bad when people would call, dial up would go out
Speaker 1: and DSL was still not another not available. I'll never
Speaker 1: forget this one instance. So I guess our friend Michael,
Speaker 1: we were like out in what's called the wilderness where
Speaker 1: you can kill other players. I was with him and
Speaker 1: my internet went out, and then he killed me. My
Speaker 1: friend that I was supposed to be like my ally
Speaker 1: killed me and took all my stuff. And then when
Speaker 1: I wrong in im just like, what how did that
Speaker 1: make you feel at the time this is happening, and
Speaker 1: how do you feel about it all these years later?
Speaker 1: I mean I felt freaking angry at Michael. I mean
Speaker 1: he was supposed to be have my teammate, he's like
Speaker 1: my friend right now, I just have trust issues with
Speaker 1: I quit ultim online that day because everything I had
Speaker 1: fought for for years was it. God. This is Matt Frederick.
Speaker 1: I am an executive producer on Ephemeral officially also a
Speaker 1: host of stuff they don't want you to know. Let
Speaker 1: me take you back to middle school. I'm playing ultim
Speaker 1: online with my friend Victor. We're playing all the time.
Speaker 1: He's got a couple of characters. He's really good at it.
Speaker 1: And I've got one character. Character's name is Malachi. And
Speaker 1: I'm doing everything I can to get my fame and
Speaker 1: my carma up. I'm trying to make money. I finally
Speaker 1: get there. I'm the illustrious something Malachi, and I just
Speaker 1: got enough money to buy a boat, which was a
Speaker 1: really big deal because in the game, you can either
Speaker 1: have a house or a boat where you could store
Speaker 1: all the stuff you've gathered, or you've got to just
Speaker 1: put it in the bank, which is just kind of
Speaker 1: you know, that's fine, whatever, But if you really want
Speaker 1: to be somebody in ltimonline, you need a boat or
Speaker 1: a house. I got this boat. I used all my money.
Speaker 1: I took it over to the water, and I placed
Speaker 1: my boat in the water, and I teleported onto my
Speaker 1: boat and I started putting my best stuff into the
Speaker 1: cargo hold of this boat, and I was so excited
Speaker 1: and I was going to transfer that stuff over. I
Speaker 1: was gonna get to see the world in ultimonline. Some
Speaker 1: other character unbeknownst to me kind of walks over and
Speaker 1: just hanging out on the shoreline, and then they just disappear,
Speaker 1: and like, oh, that was weird. Well, it turns out
Speaker 1: they had cast an invisibility spell on themselves and then
Speaker 1: teleported onto my boat. All of a sudden, I see
Speaker 1: all of my stuff coming out of my ship's cargo hold,
Speaker 1: all of my most important, most fought for magic items,
Speaker 1: my money, all the rest of the money that I had.
Speaker 1: Everything just goes onto this guy, and I'm freaking out.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out what's going on. So I
Speaker 1: try and take everything else out of the boat and
Speaker 1: then teleport off of it, because if you do that,
Speaker 1: you could double click on the boat and it shrinks
Speaker 1: down and you can put it in your backpack, basically
Speaker 1: like it's an item. But this guy had taken my
Speaker 1: spare key from my boat out of my boat, and
Speaker 1: he was able to click on it and take my boat,
Speaker 1: and then he just got the kind of there. It's
Speaker 1: not cool. I'm still to this day upset. I think
Speaker 1: just a not knowing and the amount of energy you
Speaker 1: put into something that you can never get back, where
Speaker 1: it's like it's just gone. Those are the two things
Speaker 1: that strike the deepest. Hi. My name is Kevin Cool.
Speaker 1: I reside in Portland, Oregon. I've been playing video games
Speaker 1: for over twenty years, and in two thousand and seventeen
Speaker 1: on Madden Online for the Xbox I was ranked with
Speaker 1: the top twenty three percent of online participants. So I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm pretty good. I was kind of young,
Speaker 1: so video games are pretty big. The game was on
Speaker 1: the Nintendo sixty four console. The legend of Zelda, okerry
Speaker 1: enough time, and if I remember correctly, you got three
Speaker 1: safe files in Zelda. The one that it hurts the
Speaker 1: most was what I'd call my master one. This is
Speaker 1: one where I had beat the game, gotten everything that
Speaker 1: all the little side quest you can save it right
Speaker 1: before you beat the final boss. You can go back
Speaker 1: in fight the boss continuously over and over. So that
Speaker 1: was my third safe file, just because it was like
Speaker 1: I beat the game, I had all my cool stuff.
Speaker 1: So you know, when your friends come over, you gotta
Speaker 1: show off, so it's like, oh I did this, like,
Speaker 1: oh you got the mirror shi, oh you got to
Speaker 1: have her boots. I don't know if it was like
Speaker 1: a glitch or what, but the state was still there.
Speaker 1: You could access it, but it just froze. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the exact set point that it would freeze at, but
Speaker 1: you always knew it was gonna glick. So it was
Speaker 1: like the countdown. It is either thirty seconds, thirty minutes,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever it is. You could load the save,
Speaker 1: but you could never actually beat it and continues to
Speaker 1: play it again. There's always a wish. We're just paused,
Speaker 1: and it would just stay there and there's nothing you
Speaker 1: could do. It was very painful, as most people are.
Speaker 1: At first, I'm in denial. It's not broken, it's that's
Speaker 1: whatever happened. So you do the old run around, takes
Speaker 1: the game out, blowing the cartridge, lick the cartridge. Yes,
Speaker 1: we went there. Lick the cartridge. I think even like
Speaker 1: try to like put a fork or something metal on.
Speaker 1: It's like remagnetize it, even though that didn't do anything,
Speaker 1: you know, kid magic. And then I'm pretty sure I
Speaker 1: went to Anger and ran around screaming and yelling at everyone,
Speaker 1: and I hated the world for probably a week. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say a month. I don't really remember, but I
Speaker 1: know I hated everyone because I was so mad because
Speaker 1: I've spent so many hours and I could never do
Speaker 1: that again, and that was the perfect file and nothing
Speaker 1: would ever come close to that ever again, and nothing
Speaker 1: in my life mattered anymore. And I was not gonna
Speaker 1: pass the seventh grade, and my girlfriend was gonna dump me,
Speaker 1: and my mom was gonna make meat loaf for dinner
Speaker 1: for a week. Life, as I know it had ended
Speaker 1: at that point, as you can tell, is rehash some pain.
Speaker 1: There's that song that was playing when the barrow went out.
Speaker 1: I still can't listen to it without getting like, Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Annie Reese. I'm a podcast host for the show's
Speaker 1: stuff I've never told you and save her. My brothers
Speaker 1: were notorious for just erasing my save file. So one
Speaker 1: of my favorite games, Final Fantasy three Slash six, they
Speaker 1: would just erase it before I could get anywhere, and
Speaker 1: it would be heartbreaking every time. Once I was playing
Speaker 1: Final Fantasy ten and I put hours into Final Fantasy tin,
Speaker 1: I normally am not somebody who like levels up to
Speaker 1: go fight the ultimate Boss. I did in that game.
Speaker 1: It was Christmas. Eve had gotten this weapon that you
Speaker 1: needed to fight this ultimate boss and all the stuff.
Speaker 1: For me, it was a huge deal. I'd never done
Speaker 1: anything like that. Power went out, Power went out, lost everything,
Speaker 1: the entire hundred fifty hours gone, and I was right
Speaker 1: at the part where I was going to fight it,
Speaker 1: and I could have saved right after that, and I
Speaker 1: was so scarred by I could play it, and I
Speaker 1: never tried to do it again. It's not worth it.
Speaker 1: Game Shark was a very attractive idea. Oh, I can
Speaker 1: just use these cheet codes and I can get everything
Speaker 1: I want in the game. This is awesome. But as
Speaker 1: a youngster, what I didn't know is that what game
Speaker 1: Shark really does is it goes into the game and
Speaker 1: alters like the code in the game and like basically
Speaker 1: screws the entire game. Up. Hi am Trevor Young. I
Speaker 1: am a producer on Ephemeral. I was playing also Final
Speaker 1: Fantasy ten And I don't know if you remember this,
Speaker 1: but back in the late nineties early two thousand's, there
Speaker 1: was the think called game Shark, and it would allow
Speaker 1: you to install these sorts of like cheat codes and
Speaker 1: all these other various ways to get items in the
Speaker 1: game without actually having to do anything. I had this
Speaker 1: final Fantasy ten Say file that I had dumped hours
Speaker 1: and hours and hours into doing all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 1: beating every bus, every endgame thing you could possibly do.
Speaker 1: But there was still like a handful of things that
Speaker 1: I was really frustrated that I couldn't do, like I
Speaker 1: think a couple of ultimate weapons and some other things
Speaker 1: that like are just like really hard to do in
Speaker 1: that game, in the endgame, And so I used the
Speaker 1: game Shark to get those few things. And what the
Speaker 1: game Shark did was it like blitzed out my whole file,
Speaker 1: so like it gave me those things, but like everything
Speaker 1: else was like glitch out after that, Like I don't
Speaker 1: know what it did to the code. It was basically
Speaker 1: an unplayable safe in the game. Every time I would
Speaker 1: log on, like the characters would just be like moving
Speaker 1: across the map without me touching it. I'd have like
Speaker 1: these kind of random encounters, and then like the random
Speaker 1: encounters would just be like these monsters that would move
Speaker 1: around a lot and like didn't do what they were
Speaker 1: supposed to do. It was really weird. Basically, like the
Speaker 1: game was unplayable after that, Like the game Shark just
Speaker 1: completely screwed up this same file, and so I basically
Speaker 1: just had to wipe the whole thing and start over.
Speaker 1: Like there was nothing I could do. There was no
Speaker 1: way to play it. Luckily, Final Fantasy ten ones itself
Speaker 1: pretty well to replayability, but still I was pretty heartbroken.
Speaker 1: I don't think I played it for like two years.
Speaker 1: Last question, this is a quick one. Let's say I
Speaker 1: knocked on your door tomorrow and said, here you go,
Speaker 1: here's your system. Would you try to do this again?
Speaker 1: The answer to that is yes, I fully intend to
Speaker 1: when Diabolo four comes out. That's the kind of insane
Speaker 1: thing about it is, even though I have so much pain,
Speaker 1: the pain drives me to do it again. I don't
Speaker 1: think I would ever try to do like what I
Speaker 1: did in my example of losing it. I wouldn't try
Speaker 1: to get every Ultimate weapon again. I would play it again.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to try to get all those weapons
Speaker 1: and fight all those Ultimate bosses ever again. I think
Speaker 1: I would try, Especially now with the last two years
Speaker 1: being a pandemic, that's an extra time on my hands.
Speaker 1: So all things considered him like plotting out, I could
Speaker 1: have easily done it over the past two years. It's
Speaker 1: more so, like I said, the emotional investment. Do I
Speaker 1: want to put that much energy into something where I
Speaker 1: know it could be taken away in an instant and
Speaker 1: there's nothing I can do. But I would probably say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would probably do it again. I quit playing with
Speaker 1: him now I still have trust issues twenty years later
Speaker 1: with him. Could you see yourself going through the wilderness
Speaker 1: with him again? No, I would definitely try again, but
Speaker 1: it would take a lot of time. I would need
Speaker 1: some healing, some self reflection. I would have to like
Speaker 1: take a solo trip to a cabin in the woods
Speaker 1: in a mountains somewhere and really like think about my
Speaker 1: life for a couple of months, and then I'd come
Speaker 1: back to it and start a new game, a final
Speaker 1: Fantasy ten. If you came up to me with the
Speaker 1: old Dell computer and you had ultim Online loaded up
Speaker 1: and it had a secure connection to the server, There's
Speaker 1: no way in hell I would try and play Ultimate it.
Speaker 1: This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Max Williams,
Speaker 1: with special thanks to Jesse Funk. Those were the voices
Speaker 1: of Matt Davidson, Josh Chandler, Matt Frederick, Kevin Cool, Any Reese,
Speaker 1: and Trevor Young. Some of the great music in today's episode,
Speaker 1: like the piece you are hearing now, comes courtesy of
Speaker 1: the artist mon Plies here. If you have listened to
Speaker 1: Ephemeral for a while, you've heard a lot of their work,
Speaker 1: and we are happy to announce we will have an
Speaker 1: upcoming episode in interviewing the artists for now here more
Speaker 1: at loyalty Freak music dot com. What's been your most
Speaker 1: heartbreaking experience with the safe tell us on social media.
Speaker 1: We're at a federal show and check out the two
Speaker 1: part exploration of the history of video games and other
Speaker 1: podcasts from I Heart Radio by visiting the i heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.