This week in RetroNots, the secrets of Guiden and Ninja.

Hi everyone, welcome to RetroNots episode recorded remotely.

I'm Jeremy Parish and with me on the other end of the line, we have the guys from Sabotage, who have created a very cool game called The Messenger, which you probably have played at this point.

If you haven't, how have you missed it?

It's been in the news lately, you guys have been racking up awards and so on and so forth.

So introduce yourselves, let the folks at home know who we're talking to.

My name is Tyria, I'm one of the two founders of Sabotage and I do basically game direction, game design and writing.

I'm Math Thain Brouar and I'm the other co-founder of Sabotage and I like to say that I'm the support character doing all kind of administrative marketing and support community management work to help make sure that the team just makes the best possible game.

Well, you know, anyone who's played The Messenger knows that the shopkeeper is a very important character in the game, so I think it all works out.

So yeah, I mean, I think you guys have created a really interesting game because it wears its classic influences very much on its sleeve, but it combines those influences in a very fresh and interesting way.

And it also does a really great job of kind of capturing what was so great about those classics, like the things that really made people love them.

It's not just the look of it, it's not just like the design of it, but also everything on the way all the way down to the basic controls and the responsiveness.

And I feel like that's something where so many people sort of, you know, miss the ball when they're trying to recapture that sort of classic spirit.

And yeah, the Messenger really, really hits the right notes and it feels good when you play it. And I think that's a big part of its success.

I don't know if you guys want to talk a little bit about that and kind of what inspired it and the links that you've gone through to make sure the game plays.

You know, the way that we remember the classics that we've been playing.

Right. And you touched on something really important at the end of that question, which is the way we remember them, right?

Which is different than the way they actually were.

You know, sometimes we have a pink glasses when we look back on these games and maybe the controls were a bit more stiff than we remember and the music could get repetitive.

You know, and the difficulty it wasn't always fair, you know, so it was kind of the attention was to strike a balance between the things that feel retro but then all the things that don't really hold up anymore, you know, to leave those aside or to rethink them, you know, so that it's still it has the comfort of a modern game.

While still hitting, striking the the court of what was good there with the nostalgia, you know.

Yeah, for my own part, I kind of recently experienced that. I mean, I don't think I experienced that too often because I just never stopped playing old games.

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