Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

Joining me today for the first time in too long a time since our Tahoe vacation, freelance writer Julian Murdoch. Julian, welcome back.

It's only been like three weeks, but it feels like forever.

It really does. We also welcome for the first time. See, now we have this whole conversation about titles and all

I can think of is Mr. Manchu so we welcome the man who puts the foo in the blue manchu

uh John Shea John welcome to the show hi everyone thanks great to be on the show so John uh we've

been looking forward to getting you on the show here to talk about your game Card Hunter, which you can play for free online.

And, you know, I think a great place to start would just be to talk about a little bit what brought you to Card Hunter, where this game sort of comes from.

And I know your background is with

irrational uh so maybe you could talk a little bit about the journey that got you from rational to

a blue manchu and then gave us card hunter sure well it's kind of a long um slightly crazy journey

of course irrational games was um this you know the focus of my work and my life for a very

long time. And after we sold the company to 2K, a sale which finished in 2005, the genesis of Cardh Hunter, where did Cart Hunter come from?

It's been kind of a long, strange journey.

Cart Hunter's really, I guess, is a, it might be, to describe it as a vanity project

probably wouldn't be unfair, but it's, I guess it's more of a,

something that I always wanted to do. I worked for many years at Irrational Games, and we

mostly made games for other people, and I was very happy to work on those games. I enjoyed

working on immersive first-person shooters, but I really like strategy games, and I always wanted to work on a strategy game.

And after we sold the Rational Games to 2K, I continued to work for 2K for several years, and we worked on Bioshock.

And I've had an opportunity to leave and to fund my own projects after that.

And what I really wanted to do was work on a strategy game,

...