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VGHH Episode 130: Spycraft
🕑 Added 2025-04-29 10:00:40 +0000 UTCPhil Salvador hosts Polygon’s Clayton Ashley and Simone de Rochefort to discuss a documentary they produced last year called The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft | Full Polygon Documentary about the 1996 FMV CD-ROM game, Spycraft.
Blog post mentioned in show: https://www.filfre.net/2023/03/spycraft-the-great-game-part-1-or-parallel-spies/
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A full transcript of this episode is available on our website: https://gamehistory.org/episode-130-spycraft/
See more from Polygon:
Website: polygon.com
YouTube: /polygon
Clayton Ashley’s Podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/temporalculturewar/
Simone de Rochefort’s social handle: @doomquasar
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TRANSCRIPT
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith
Phil Salvador 00:09
Hello and welcome to the Video Game History Hour presented by the Video Game History Foundation. I'm Phil Salvador, library director at the Video Game History Foundation. And on each episode of this show, we bring on people who have lived through video game history, or have a story to tell about video game history, and we've got a heck of a story to tell today. Today, the podcast, we have from Polygon joining us, it's Clayton Ashley and Simone de Rochefort here to talk about a documentary they produced that came out last year called The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, about the 1996 FMV CD-ROM, game, Spycraft that has a whole complicated story behind it. So Clayton, Simone, thanks for joining.
Simone de Rochefort 00:50
Thank you for having us.
Clayton Ashley 00:51
Thank you.
Phil Salvador 00:53
So, yeah, I think we can just get right into it. First off, for folks who have not watched it, I would say pause this podcast and go watch the documentary right now. It's super well produced, and we're gonna get kind of into the weeds about the making of this thing and the story here. But just as kind of an overview for folks who have chosen not to pause the podcast and are still just going, what is Spycraft? Just a really quick overview of this thing.
Simone de Rochefort 01:14
Ooh. Well, first, I'll say, if you do want to pause the podcast and watch it, you can do that at youtube.com/polygon, and--
Clayton Ashley 01:21
It's free!
Simone de Rochefort 01:22
It's free, it's online. It's on YouTube. Sorry, you want the overview of the documentary or of the game itself?
Phil Salvador 01:30
The game itself. What is Spycraft? For folks who have never heard of this thing,
Simone de Rochefort 01:33
Clayton, do you want to give them the pitch?
Clayton Ashley 01:35
Yeah. So it's a, as Phil mentioned, it's a FMV game, which means full motion video game. And this was this strange era of video games where they tried to incorporate actual video of human beings in real life doing things. And some of these made this video footage more interactive than others, but generally the idea was that a good big chunk of these games would actually be humans on screen. And in the case of Spycraft, they went the extra mile and made a couple of those people on screen actual spies. A guy from the CIA, a guy from the KGB, in addition to a bunch of actors, some surprisingly famous, and put them all in a sort of spy adventure story set in the post-Cold War era there. There are loose nukes, there are international criminal organizations. There's an election in Russia and a possible coup going on there. It's a lot of stuff going on, a ripped from the headlines, sort of adventure. And it really tries to focus a lot on making you feel like a spy, making you actually do spy, sort of, looking through documents and cross-referencing things and trying to do some detective work, which is also actually good. The surprising thing is, we went back and played this game, and that gameplay is shockingly impressive, not even just for the era, but even today,
Simone de Rochefort 02:59
I'll say, actually, yeah, the game is available on Steam, and that is something that is very important. So if you watch the documentary, you can also go play the game immediately.
Clayton Ashley 03:07
Play living history.
Phil Salvador 03:08
Go play the, like, 15-hour video games, and come back here and listen to the podcast about the making of it.
Simone de Rochefort 03:13
See you in, like, 25 hours everyone.
Phil Salvador 03:15
Yeah, see you next week. So what got you interested in this game? Like, were you interested in the FMV era beforehand, or did this game just kind of come on your radar?
Clayton Ashley 03:24
I think Simone? Yeah. You know how this started.
Simone de Rochefort 03:28
Yeah. So Clayton and I love mystery games, and this came to us through a very roundabout way. We were playing a mystery game called A Hand With Many Fingers during a charity marathon one year. And this is a fantastic game that I also recommend. It's pretty short. It involves going through archives and putting together literal cork boards of conspiracy theories around some of these real life historical figures from the 1960s involved in the CIA, this whole scandal that happened in Australia that I won't get into. So Clayton and I played this game.
Clayton Ashley 04:01
That would be spoilers for the game, actually.
Simone de Rochefort 04:03
Yeah, we played this game. We loved it. And we were like, Okay, let's just Google everyone in this game and look at their Wikipedia pages. And William Colby, the ex-CIA director, was one of the figures in this game, A Hand With Many Fingers. We're reading his Wikipedia page. It's crazy. The Vietnam War Is there, a lot of the CIA scandals in the 1970s, and then we see his credits, and we see there's another game there, and it's Spycraft, the Great Game, and it's an FMV, and he's in it, playing himself. And we thought, Hey, what? Why we gotta play that. And of course, it was on Steam, and that, just initially, we started playing it after work, because we love games where you take notes, solve mysteries, like, solve puzzles and things, it seemed perfectly up our alley. We said to each other, We're not going to make content about this. And then I we had a pitch meeting one day, and I didn't have any pitches. And I said to Clayton, Hey, real quick. What if we made content about this? Yes, so that's how that happened.
Phil Salvador 05:04
Goodness. So you mentioned that one of the folks, William Coby, the ex CIA director, was involved. There's a lot of folks involved in this, because it wasn't just, you know, the developers, but they had the ex-CIA guy, sort of theoretically advising on this game, but also appearing as themselves. They also had an ex-KGB person, as Clayton mentioned, who was also involved in this game, right?
Simone de Rochefort 05:24
Yeah, this is true.
Clayton Ashley 05:26
Oleg Kalugin, former Major General of the KGB. He actually had come to America in the in the mid 90s, again, post-Cold War, kind of on a corporate advising role, and he also kind of has a strange story about how he ended up in this game, as does former CIA director William Colby, and their strange stories about how they ended up in this game are almost like half of what the documentary is about.
Simone de Rochefort 05:56
Yeah. So by the time they're in this game, they have met, they have become friends. We actually, when we interviewed Colby's son, he showed us a photo of them together in Moscow, and I think, 1993 with an unknown man who, like, really resembles Kalugin. I wouldn't be surprised if they were related somehow, but that is conjecture on my part. They're just, you know, friendly arms around each other smiling in a library, and they're on record talking quite respectfully about each other by this point. They had completely left behind whatever ideological differences divided them during the Cold War, when they were both actively working for the KGB and CIA, which I think is, for me, one of the most-- for us both, I think that was, emotionally, one of the most intriguing things about this was, how did this happen, that these two figures ended up here together?
Phil Salvador 06:50
Yeah, I appreciated, I forget who said this in the documentary, but something that it was like, You know, they're not sharing their secrets with each other, but it's like, you know, like professionals appreciating each other's craft, like, Oh, you were also very good at running a spy agency, and that kind of developed a mutual respect based on that. So this is what I think is most interesting about this documentary is, Clayton alluded to this, or, I think, said it directly, is this documentary, for the most part, is not even about the making of the game Spycraft. I think you don't even start talking about the game itself until maybe, like, almost the halfway point of the documentary, which I think is really interesting. And you don't see that a lot, like, in especially popular facing game history, stuff. Like, I think you talk about, you don't even mention whether the game is fun or not, until like, the last 20 minutes, which I think most people lead with, like, you know, Oh, this is an iconic game. It's very important. But you led with like all the history and context here. So why take that approach for doing this
Simone de Rochefort 07:49
Editorial feedback. Boy, if I could tell you how many versions of this we went through in scripting, and I think Clayton will back me up on this. I believe in the first script that we put together, it was flipped. And we did spend the first 20 minutes or so talking about the history of FMVs, the history of this game, the making of the game, before we got to that like, twist of the human element and like, where these guys came from. And we turned that script in, and I think we got feedback from our editor in chief that it just felt like a lot of wheel spinning about like the context of the '90s and how video games were made. That wasn't-- it was, for me, really interesting.
Clayton Ashley 08:40
Yeah.
Simone de Rochefort 08:40
And not that way for a general audience, which is fair.
Clayton Ashley 08:46
I would also say that, like, we couldn't pretend like Spycraft was some huge blockbuster game everyone remembers because it kind of famously didn't do that well. And that's not entirely its own fault. It just came at the tail end of the FMV fad, it had a huge budget that it had to try to earn back, so that even made it harder to be a success. But what was so fascinating to us about it, and on the game history side, was how much this game was actually sort of a prelude to where games were going, even if it itself didn't succeed. And honestly, that was part of the editorial feedback we got was that we didn't have to try to pretend this game was something it wasn't, but it was interesting on its own face, just for what it was portending.
Phil Salvador 09:30
Interesting, yeah, we're going immediately into the deep end of, like, how you prepared this thing, but I think it's exciting because-- you're laughing, but like, you know, we have people on here who are, like, academic historians, who are, like, I want to write a book about the history of XYZ, and they do all this research. You are journalists by trade. I mean, you're not coming into this, like, you know, We are historians making history. So, like, yeah, when you're writing about an older game like this, like, you know, almost now, 30 years old game that maybe doesn't have quite as much of a cultural footprint. Like, how do you approach talking about something old like that, versus covering a more contemporary topic, I guess?
Clayton Ashley 10:04
Well, Simone, I actually feel like a good way to lead into this is the very first email you sent to Ken Berris that kind of made you decide, Oh, there's something here we should get into.
Simone de Rochefort 10:16
It's just a series of really lucky things that happened. And I think this was initially when we were pitching the story as a YouTube video, a 10 minute YouTube video. I looked up the director of the FMV portions. His name is Ken Berris. He is, like, still working today, and he had a personal website with an email address on it. And I thought, journalism, okay, I'll shoot that guy an email. He was immediately responsive and interested in talking, and that was the first, like, happy circumstance that made us feel like there was something here to pursue. And we did an initial call with him where he, you know, offered a lot of interesting stories and memories about working on the game. So that was, I think, the first step into digging into this, and continued to be the most challenging one. Getting in touch with Ken was easy. Finding other people involved in the game was quite difficult. My kind of white whale is that at the very end of the process, when we had, like, wrapped interviews we couldn't really do anymore. We had like, zero travel budget. I managed to find one of the photographers who had worked on set, and I had a phone call with her just to corroborate some details about the game. And she had her own fascinating stories, like she was the person responsible for photographing all of the props that are then used in the inserts where you know the player is interacting with an object. It's not, like, art of a telephone. It's like detailed photograph of a telephone, and you're like pressing the buttons on it with your little mouse button. But so she was one of the people involved in doing that. She was an intern in Activision back in the day, couldn't get that recorded, and that sucked a lot. But I think I'm getting away from the original question, was it about how we did research?
Phil Salvador 12:11
Yeah, because you're not usually doing, like historical research. I mean, you're looking for context as journalists, but you're not doing like, a, you know, a half year long investigative historical research. I'm just interested in, yeah, as someone coming into doing history research, like how that process was different than the kind of stuff you usually work on.
Simone de Rochefort 12:29
Yeah, absolutely. I think it was different in that the scope was massive. It was similar in that what we do as journalists is always find an expert and ask them questions. When I am doing a YouTube video about how shaders work or how horses are animated, my first step is always like, Okay, who wants to talk to me about this? And with this, that ended up being the correct instinct as well, like, who worked on it? Who can talk to us about it? That's how we found basically every interview that is in the documentary, as we, like, encountered a wall that was, Oh, no, we don't know anything about this. What do we do? And we found someone who knew things. And the most pivotal example of that was the interview with Maya, the history expert, which Clayton, if you want to expound a little bit on that, and how shockingly, late in the game that happened.
Clayton Ashley 13:26
Yeah, if you remember Simone talking about editorial feedback, there wasn't just one time this sort of script and even documentary went through kind of a reformatting. And this was at a stage where we actually had a, like, rough cut of the entire documentary, and it just felt too much at times, like a data dump, where just we weren't explaining too much stuff that we were just getting from research, but in a way that didn't feel like it was, it was being explained in a like an authentic expert way, because we couldn't claim to be experts in this history. And we found this wonderful, I remember exact title, but Maya Vinokour at NYU, and her particular expertise was in post-Soviet media studies, if I remember correctly. So it was just like Venn diagram that's mostly a circle. Perfect. when we were able to get to go and speak to her, and she helped us just fill in with this incredible like, the mortar that our wall, whatever we're constructing, was missing, that just allowed everything to start falling into place so much better in a like, the flow of the chronology of what was happening. She just gave it so much more like, verve and texture that allowed us to feel much more confident about like, Yes, this is a document with a lot of information, a lot of topics, but now it feels cohesive in a way it didn't before.
Simone de Rochefort 14:59
And like, finding her was part of a process of, like, identifying that need and then looking up every single Slavic studies program within a train ride of New York City, which is where we're both based. And, like, because we knew we wanted it to be a physical interview, like we were so close to the end of it, we didn't want another zoom interview. It had to be local because of the budget. I emailed a lot of professors. And, like, she was one of two who reached out, and she was the one that worked. And it was like, again, kismet, the absolute right person for that role.
Phil Salvador 15:31
How many Slavic studies programs are there within a train ride of New York City?
Clayton Ashley 15:37
You might be surprised.
Simone de Rochefort 15:38
I mean, Boston has a lot of colleges New York, a lot of colleges.
Phil Salvador 15:43
That's fair, that's legitimate. But I think that is a good point, though, that, you know, we'll talk about this a little bit more later on, but you know, the sort of two figures who become the focus of the documentary, Colby and Kalugin, don't actually have a huge role in the game, so the fact that you got that context to be like, No, this is why it mattered, and where they came from, and this is what was happening and how they contributed to all the sort of tension that existed. Like that helps center their story in a way that their participation in the game could have probably been just like a couple paragraphs. That really helps, I think, make it. But to get back to the game itself for a bit, to talk about that, we talked about this era of, you know, of FMV games, of having actual people in games. And this is something that fascinates me, personally. It was why I really wanted to do this episode is, I think I've seen it referred to as, like, the Siliwood era, where it's like, oh, Silicon Valley's the new Hollywood, which did not happen, but it's fascinating because as you go through the documentary, you mentioned all these details about how, like, they built a fake CIA headquarters that they then filmed in which, like, for, I don't know, like, an episode of The X-Files like that makes sense, but like, for a video game, that's kind of unheard of. I'm curious, as you were talking with folks, whether it made it in the documentary or not. You mentioned the photographer of interesting stories, like, what stood out to you about like, the production of this thing.
Simone de Rochefort 17:04
Man, the production was crazy. They clearly-- so at this point, to go into a little of the backstory, this is an Activision game. Activision had gone bankrupt in '91 and then it was purchased by Bobby Kotick, who, like is still involved in the company. Everyone knows! Yeah, yay. Another person that at a point in time during the production we had reached out to interview, and that just didn't happen due to a lot of factors. Anyway. So this, this was coming during a time when everyone was thinking, oh my god, maybe this FMV thing. This is the big new thing, the beautiful graphics, the beautiful video. Let's do it. It's more immersive than ever. Activision is bankrupt and desperately like trying to kind of claw back to success, and they see this format as the way that that happens. It's the new Hollywood. Like you said, it's exciting, it's vital. It's new.
Clayton Ashley 18:06
It's adult. It's not just for kids anymore.
Simone de Rochefort 18:09
Yeah, ooh! And their solution is this, like, big budget, like blockbuster movie game. And I personally, like, I do not actually know where the money for this production came from, but their whole MO was, this is going to be glossy, and it is going to be like, high value. Ken Berris mentioned that when you were talking about shooting these scenes, and like, you mentioned a lot of the games at this time that were shot FMVs, they were actors, and they were green screened onto digital sets. Spycraft does not do that. It has real actors in these beautiful, detailed sets full of props and like quite complicated for computers of the time, camera movements that were definitely a concern when they were like processing this footage. They try to do actual camera moves like you would see in a film. But they couldn't do things that were too complicated or too quick, because the computers that are, again, rendering these like 300 x 600 videos couldn't handle these movements, they would like make it look like garbage. So yeah, the production of it is far beyond what you see in most of the FMVs of this era.
Clayton Ashley 19:27
I also remember from speaking with especially our actor-- sorry, do you remember his name, Simone?
Simone de Rochefort 19:36
Kirk Waller.
Clayton Ashley 19:37
Kirk Waller, he was a fantastic interview. And there was more we talked about that wasn't directly relevant to Spycraftthat kind of gave a sense of a little bit how there was a Wild West element to the FMV era, because it was this, like it was a new format. We're going to try new things. It's messy a little bit, a lot, sometimes. A lot of these FMVs looked pretty, I don't know, trashy, low budget, low effort, but he was mentioning the fact that before this FMV, he was in this chess but all the members of the chess board are human actors, like a knight or a bishop or whatever. And he said that he was the knight, and for one scene, he was in a bunch of armor, and they put him on a horse, and he had to ride down a hill at 50 miles an hour, and he thought he was going to die. That wasn't something we could-- it was not relevant enough to put in our documentary, but it was just a fascinating, like, little window into-- it was a wild time when they were making FMVs, because there was, I guess, a lot of money sloshing around because of the hope, the thought that this would be something bigger than would have actually ended up being.
Phil Salvador 20:43
Yeah, I had to look this up. Is this Chess Wars? Is that the one we're talking?
Clayton Ashley 20:46
I believe so.
Simone de Rochefort 20:47
It is, yeah.
Phil Salvador 20:47
I don't think there's many FMV chess games, so that's fascinating. But, no, I think about that era the same way, you know, we see, you know, whatever is happening now with, like, Blockchain or AI, where it's like, oh, there's speculative money being thrown around, and then it kind of doesn't pan out the way they hoped, putting tens of millions of dollars behind these games.
Simone de Rochefort 21:06
No, you're so right. Yeah, it's this hope in the investment in the new technology. But then in practice, it's like, Okay, when I move the chess piece, do I want to see the interactive clip where now the knight is attacking the queen? Not really. What do I get out of that?
Phil Salvador 21:24
There is one story that I want you all to tell this one, because this really stood out to me. I think you even-- this is the one you kind of lead into the documentary with, where they're filming a scene in their ,like, replica of the Red Square, and things kind of go off the rails for a reason that I don't think has ever happened in another video game before or since.
Clayton Ashley 21:45
Now, this was actually what I was mentioning the first like it was the first email, or maybe it was that first conversation with Jim Barris and he, he just, I felt like mentioned this almost casually, like, Oh yeah, one day there was almost a riot on set when Kalugin came in. What? Excuse me, there was a riot on set? Like, again, because video games don't usually have a set. The idea that there was a riot on the set of a video game with the former Major General the KGB, that was just, you know.
Phil Salvador 22:15
there's a lot of pieces you have to work up to to get to that point.
Clayton Ashley 22:17
Yeah, yeah, there's a story here. So I think that was something that, like, we know there's a lot of history here, and FMVs are maybe too weird for a lot of people, but we have to know how this happened.
Simone de Rochefort 22:28
Yeah. So his story was, this was when they were-- there's a large scene, a set piece in Red Square. It actually forms kind of one of the finales of the game Spycraft. There's a huge crowd. You as the CIA agent are moving through the crowd trying to find the villain that you're looking for. And they got a lot of like, crowds of people. And Berris' story is that they hired a lot of actual Eastern European people from various countries part of the former Soviet Union, and that on the day that they were filming this scene, Kalugin, the ex-KGB Major General, had come in for a costume fitting or something, and he was seen and recognized, and people started getting heated and upset, and that like the big buff grips and I think the photographer that I interviewed, I'm not sure if she mentioned this as well, there were policemen on set as well, who kind of, like calmed things down. But yeah, this was just one of those stories that felt so of a time to us, because, you know, this is so soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It functionally happened yesterday for people at this time, and it was on the verge of a big election that was happening soon after this in Russia. So it was still a really politically intense and confusing and turbulent time you know, as rosy as we think about the '90s, now, it was wild.
Clayton Ashley 24:07
I believe someone in the crowd, at least, according to Berris, literally says "That man killed my father." And based on the research, we go back and look at Kaluigin's history, he definitely as a KGB or former spy, tries to frame himself in the best, most positive light. But that person may not have been incorrect when he made that accusation. And that's that's the wild thing. We don't know. It's not like we could confirm it. And also, to be clear, we reached out to to Oleg Kalugin. He is still alive. He's actually affiliated with the International Spy Museum, but we are not able to get an interview with him, despite our best efforts.
Phil Salvador 24:48
But I think that's what the documentary does well, is that you need that context to understand why that moment matters. Again, there's like, so many pieces leading up to it that it's not just like, this game happened. There was a riot. It's like, no, it was this exact era and this exact time when this was possible, leading to all of this happening. There's just so many pieces there. It reminds me a little bit, and this will segue into a question, I promise, but it reminds me a little bit of when Sierra did the fourth game in the Police Quest series, and was like, And this game was sponsored by Daryl Gates, the disgraced former head of the LAPD! And boy people at Sierra were not thrilled about that, but almost strikes me as kind of a similar thing, where it's this very weird connection happening only because there was, like money being thrown around, and also these kind of disgraced people involved. Which that was the question I had, was we talked about, you know, how Colby and Kalugin are both involved with this game. You kind of dance around this a little bit the documentary, but why did they do this game? Why are they even involved with Spycraft?
Simone de Rochefort 25:49
I wish that I had a better answer for you on this.
Clayton Ashley 25:52
Yeah, we can really only speculate.
Simone de Rochefort 25:53
This is one of those things where if I had been able to talk to Bobby Kotick, I would have asked this, but we were not able to get in touch with any of the people involved in casting. Well, I do know that Colby at this time, is a private citizen. My understanding is that he is the person who brought in Kalugin, but I do not specifically know where the Activision connection came in, or whether it was through someone else involved in this process. But as you point out, like at this time, video games are kind of striving. There's this tension between their existence as children's entertainment or serious entertainment, and there's these real efforts that are happening to like, Oh, we're make the serious game that's about the real issues, like the Daryl Gates game that you mentioned. And people are really just kind of grasping for ways to be taken seriously and this is just an example of one of the ways that people making video games are attempting to get the medium taken seriously in a way that, in retrospect, creates something like kind of charmingly campy and problematic as well. But that's kind of why I love it, because it's just such an artifact of the era.
Clayton Ashley 25:58
I know we have from at least Carl, Carl Colby, the son of William Colby, his sort of speculation that his father may have done it in some sense, maybe to, I think he says, flip the bird at Washington. And the kind of idea that, Oh, you just, you go and write a book, that's what you do after your service. There's like, sort of a standard way to act after you're retired in that world, but the fact that he felt a little bit, I don't know, screwed by how he got kicked out of being the director of CIA, that this was, in some sense, maybe intentionally meant to be a little cheeky. But it is still odd that Activision's idea was, We need this authenticity in order to make this real, to make people believe it's, you know, for adults. They were looking for that espionage cache. And we also know we connect this to the taught era at the time, the kind of spy stuff was big, so that was also probably a little bit of a market research thing, but a wild happenstance that it all came together at this particular time.
Phil Salvador 28:32
Yeah, it's interesting because, yeah, I think the interview you mentioned, they said that Colby saw this as being, potentially being fun, in quotes, I think was the word they used as in terms of, you know what to do with your post-CIA career. But I think you get to a really good point, which I'm also glad you, you know, you get it in the documentary, or at least, kind of allude to this, which is that all parties seem to have different reasons for wanting to do this, like for Activision, it's definitely the like the Daryl Gates, like you get a name of the box credit. But there was, I think this was something that was really well done, especially when you talked with Maya, the Slavic studies professor, is that you kind of implied that these people who were involved were kind of on the outs in their industry, a little bit, and there was a little bit of like, kind of brand building going on where it's like, look me the ex-KGB guy. This is my, you know, subscribe to my Patreon, kind of energy to it a little bit. But like, I appreciate it. I don't know if you can talk about this in terms of, like, how you edited it, but like, you never come out and directly say that-- you're never like, oh, they did this for clout. Like, you never, like, come out and like, directly say anything like that. But that implication is kind of there in the story.
Simone de Rochefort 29:42
Yeah. I mean, I'm certain that Activision did it for clout, like they used and abused these public figures, Colby and Kalugin, in all of their marketing,
Clayton Ashley 29:51
They are literally on the box. Like, that's not a joke. Their names are right there on the front.
Simone de Rochefort 29:55
Yeah, which is so funny because, like, as you've pointed out, Kalugin has one scene, Colby has a few videos in the game. They are they are themselves. They are characters, but they are, by no means the main people you are interacting with.
Phil Salvador 30:08
They were like, "advisors" on the game, in quotes, right? Like, I don't know if that even means in this case, but--
Simone de Rochefort 30:13
Yes. "Advisors" yeah, allegedly.
Clayton Ashley 30:17
We've had to, like, that's based on Activision marketing, and because we couldn't get a direct response from Activision about it we have to just say, like, According to them in a lot of interviews, they seem to say this at the bottom.
Simone de Rochefort 30:28
Berris mentioned it as well.
Clayton Ashley 30:29
And Berris
Clayton Ashley 30:30
And not a half-bad author. We definitely did get a lot out of his book, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligent Espionage Against the West, which came out only a year before, or, I guess, two years before, Spycraft came out, but a year before, he was in Spycraft. And it's, it's shockingly candid, but again, you know, it's from his perspective, painting himself in the best light, and it really gives you a sense ofhe knew where his, I guess Maya Vinokour put it, he knewwhere bread was buttered at this point, and it was presenting himself as this expert. And why not in a video game?
Simone de Rochefort 30:30
Yeah, but Kalugin is a very interesting figure. He has in his, you know, post-KGB and then post-corporate career become the kind of go to pundit for right wing programs when they want to talk to someone who has this cred of former-KGB, ran afoul of the KGB, ran for Russian parliament, failed to reform the government, came to America. He has this wonderful narrative. And as a, you know, he's no fan of Putin. He is happy to go on any program, or he was, he's quite old now, but he has been on many programs, you know, as the go-to guy to, like, talk about this, you know, This is Russia. This is the real Russia. And I see a sort of-- I, again, have not been able to speak to him. I desperately wish we had been able to-- really hard to get in touch with an ex-KGB spy, if you don't work for aright wing media company. I do see a similarity between like his, the interviews that he has done post-Spycraft like, you know, leading up to now. And, you know, being in this game like, it's fun, it's frothy, and he is very good on camera, and he's great at talking.
Phil Salvador 32:29
Yeah, I was about to suggest that you set up like a shell corporation, fake right wing gaming-- like Freedom Gaming, to see if you can then get an interview about--
Simone de Rochefort 32:39
Oh man.
Clayton Ashley 32:41
There was a tour of him going through the Spy Museum, like midway through making our documentary. It was like, Why won't you talk to us? Why are you doing this?
Simone de Rochefort 32:50
It's an interview that he did with a like, Russian language news organization. I reached out to them, and I was like, Help me. Nobody ever gets back to me. Like, literally months before the documentary was supposed to be published, possibly weeks I was still, like-- because he was my he is my white whale. He's still my white whale. Kalugin, if you're out there, please, I'm sorry that I said you were a bit of a shill. I do want to talk to you.
Phil Salvador 33:17
Kalugin, if you're listening to Video Game History Hour, please email KGB@gamehistory.org, we will watch for your email. Robin. I need you to set up the email address for us. Yeah, please.
Phil Salvador 33:29
Thanks, Robin. But I think this is actually, it's interesting because, you know, we've established all this with having these people, these spy bonafides, and the story of how they got involved. And I think it's interesting. As the documentary goes on, you do this kind of slow rug pull, sort of where it's like, actually, the Spycraft is kind of inauthentic. You talk to someone from the Spy Museum who's like, I don't know about this. Like, a lot of that is, it's a really interesting approach, because, again, I think it would be easy, like we said earlier, just being like, you know, The greatest game ever! But like, you enjoyed it, but, you know, it doesn't quite live up to the bonafides they made for it. I'm just curious, again, I keep saying, like, I'm curious how you structured this, but it's interesting, because I feel like it's so typical of video game history content to need something to be a hidden gem, or this great, lost example of amazing stuff. But, like, you have, you know, Maya comes out, and I think she describes Colby and Kalugin as props or husks in the game where it's just, like, yeah, they're just being used. This has nothing to do with actual Russia or spy craft. I'm just, I'm curious if and how you talked about that, like, how you approach, you know, not necessarily valorizing this game, but being real about, like, that's not exactly what they pitched it to be.
Robin Kunimune 33:29
No problem.
Clayton Ashley 34:45
I think this is definitely a part where Maya's interview opened up some ideas to us about, like, there's a lot more here about the sort of cultural context this game exists in, which I think, without realizing it was always kind of where this documentary existed in our heads. This game, as we've mentioned a lot in this podcast, could only exist at this moment in time for a lot of reasons. The medium, it was, the people in it, the politics at the time, but it's also this reflection of where we were culturally at the time that, like there was a hopeful idea that maybe Russia and the United States could work together, knock on wood. I guess that means a totally different thing today, but this idea that we won the Cold War, and, you know, like past, you know, enemies of America now, they can become our buds, as long as they sort of do the things we want them to do, and we couldn't ignore how that was a part of what this game was reinforcing by its story. It was reinforcing the politics of the time it was delving into-- we, in a lot of ways, didn't realize how important the fact an election in Russia happening in this game was actually a massive reflection of an anxiety that Americans were feeling at that time, which is, Oh no, could the new democratic Russia immediately go back to communism after just getting off its feet and trying to have a democratically elected president. That was a real air ball at the time and-- jump ball. I don't know sports that well, I'm a video game journalist. So this idea that this game was reflecting that anxiety that Americans were having, it was reflecting how we thought about Spycraft, and sorry, you were mentioning this idea about Spycraft, and how much the game was reflecting what it meant to be a spy. I think what's interesting is, if anything, the more boring stuff you were doing in the game looking at files, cross-referencing flight travel records, that probably was pretty dang to accurate to a lot of the like grunt work of what an intelligence service does. It was when it was trying to be-- you know, there's a, there's a criminal organization called Procat that's hiring former spies to do evil, villainous things. Like, okay, that's a little bit--
Phil Salvador 37:10
And you get the ex-KGB guy to go, like, Yes, this organization exists and is evil. Yeah.
Clayton Ashley 37:15
But then even something that silly we learn in talking to Maya, actually, that's also reflecting another anxiety, which is now the main foes of America aren't other nation states, but they're these sort of amorphous, not actually associated with the state, but like an ideological organization and that was a real thing.
Simone de Rochefort 37:35
Yeah the idea that someone like a communist hardliner now in a democratic Russia could become an independent sort of threat to the United States. That was one of the anxieties that came out of that time due to, again, like the Red Scare, kind of hangover. So, yeah, that was absolutely something that the game, you know, in its own, again, schlocky, campy way does lean into. I will say you mentioned it being a hidden gem. I do think it's a hidden gem. I frankly do, it rules. We loved playing it.
Clayton Ashley 38:13
Yeah, completely, because we knew what we would get out of the interview, we spoke to our good pal, Justin McElroy, FMV aficionado, but he has a genuine expertise in this field, because he is just a passionate enthusiast. He plays tons of FMVs. He owns the old consoles, LaserDiscs, all of that. He's reputable, and he gave us the sort of framing we needed, which was, at the time, this was a stellar FMV game, one of the best. And that's almost indisputable. It just technologically, was hard to play even at the time, so not everyone even experienced that level of quality. Today, you play it on Steam. You don't even have to change the discs. It's even better than it was back then.
Phil Salvador 38:55
Does it still have like, the like, weird scanline video in the Steam version?
Simone de Rochefort 38:59
Absolutely.
Clayton Ashley 38:59
Oh yeah.
Phil Salvador 39:00
Oh goodness.
Clayton Ashley 39:01
It looks great.
Phil Salvador 39:03
But I think that gets to another point I wanted to talk about, which was this idea of kind of putting this game into context in history that I think, again, I think it's very easy to valorize these games and be like, Oh, it was, you know, too soon or ahead of its time, but you kind of, you make a really interesting point where it's both it was ahead of its time, but also behind its time, like simultaneously.
Clayton Ashley 39:24
Too early and too late.
Phil Salvador 39:25
Yeah, it feels very silly toust go, Expound on that, but expound on that.
Simone de Rochefort 39:31
Yeah, this game just got so unlucky with its release. As you mentioned, there are a lot of technical limitations. It's a very complicated game. It has a lot of videos. It has a lot of these great little puzzle elements to it. It comes out at a time when people's home computers just can't handle it. So huge, blockbuster game launch just kind of goes-- It is critically acclaimed, but just not enough people can play it and that is just one of the ways in which it is, you know, technically ahead of its time, but, like, it was not the right time for it to come out. And then at the same time, people are also starting to realize, Hey, FMVs are kind of bad. Like, wait, we don't really want to be watching a, like, looping clip of an actor talking to us when we're playing a video game, because we can, like, interact with stuff. And, oh, now these 3D games are coming out where you can just play the game and have fun the entire time, instead of, like, watching a clip and then interacting with an actor in the wrong way, and then suddenly you have to start the whole scene over. Oh, so people, As Justin mentioned in the interview with him, people who can't play Spycraft, look at Spycraft, look at other FMV games and think, yeah, this is just another one of, like, these kind of broken, weird games that I will look back very fondly on in 30 years. However, right now, I don't want this, and it doesn't get the chance that it, I think, deserves from players at the time, partially because of the reputation of the format, partially because people just can't play it because they're dang computers can't run video at like 600 pixels.
Clayton Ashley 41:21
And as Simone was mentioning, the era of 3D graphics also was just on the rise. This was just around when the N64 and the PlayStation were coming out. So there was also this, like, why would I want to play even a nicer, slightly nicer looking FMV game on a little window on my PC when I can buy a PlayStation and see all the magical 3D graphics.
Simone de Rochefort 41:43
All of the polygons.
Phil Salvador 41:44
Yeah, and DirectX was just happening. It was like, we've had three years of Myst. We've kind of, we know what's going on here. We kind of get the idea. But, yeah, not to suggest that you do not think it is a hidden gem, but I do appreciate that the framing of this was just kind of practically, like, Okay, why did this succeed or not succeed, as opposed to the point of the documentary being, Hey, this game is great, you should go play it, which I think is, again, the framing all this is, I think, different than a lot of the sort of game history content that you see out there that exists, which I appreciate. I'm also just curious. This is a very broad question, as we're getting kind of the end here-- I wrote this down. This is so broad, but what was the most interesting thing you learned? Because I guarantee, like, you talked about the photographer and like, it's so easy on this research to just end up going down a rabbit hole. Years ago, when I did an article about the the Sim Refinery, the, like business simulation game made by the people who made Sim City, which is on a previous episode, one of the first episodes of the Video Game History Hour where I talked about that. That was a case where it was just like, you know, I talked with the guy who was the developer of it at one point. He was like, Yeah, I want to talk about the time I was hired to make games for the CIA. And it was like, we just didn't have time to talk about that. It was a whole tangent, and I never got to. I'm sure there are things that like, are fascinating that you came across while doing this that like, you know, either didn't make it into the documentary, or you could do an entire additional hour about and didn't get to.
Simone de Rochefort 43:10
Clayton has the dirt on this.
Clayton Ashley 43:14
This will actually be nice, because it gives a little bit of researching in the era of the internet. And I'll just give the context. I mean, we were looking everywhere, through article archives, Internet Archive, public library searches to find images and histories of these figures and histories of games and stuff. And on one of these little research dallies, I found a YouTube video of William Colby giving a speech, and in the comment section it was kind of interesting. So William Colby, he's the only director who actually was like an agent in the field, and rose up through the ranks that way to the point where some people view him as one of the more honorable, non-politically-- never a politician.
Simone de Rochefort 43:59
Quote, unquote, "honorable" CIA directors.
Clayton Ashley 44:02
So you had a lot of these quotes or commenters in this just kind of random William Colby speech he was giving about foreign policy being like, he's an honorable guy. I respect this man. He's the only CIA director whoever knew what he's doing. And then in one of these just comments, somebody's just like, I appreciate him and his son. He was my neighbor. He was in the OJ Simpson trial. What? Excuse me, wait, this comment can't be right. It's a YouTube comment. And so I searched Carl Colby OJ Simpson trial. Pops right up. He was a neighbor of OJ Simpson, and he was called to testify about his comings and goings. So he's right there on the stand, because that trial was so videotaped, and there was something about how '90s this moment was, because this documentary was already just such a the midpoint of the '90s, all these interesting elements of geopolitics, culture, technology, coinciding, and now OJ Simpson's here. Like, I kind of couldn't believe it.
Phil Salvador 45:06
I feel like everyone gets one thing, like, you can be the son of the CIA director, or you can testify in the OJ trial. You don't get both. That's not fair. That's too many things.
Simone de Rochefort 45:16
It's really not fair.
Clayton Ashley 45:18
Something about him being in-- there's a conspiracy that he is involved in the assassination of Bob Marley. I hope I'm not getting that completely wrong, but it's--
Simone de Rochefort 45:27
It's stupid, yeah. So this is-- no, I don't even know if I should repeat the conspiracy theory, but some conspiracy theorists believe that he is partially responsible for the death of Bob Marley. This is not true.
Clayton Ashley 45:41
No, it's not.
Simone de Rochefort 45:42
He died of cancer.
Clayton Ashley 45:44
Yeah, unlike the OJ Simpson thing, but it's just like, that's why I was just like, oh, this has got to be another thing like that. Just some random internet commenter saying something wild, and the fact that it turned out to be true just blew my mind.
Phil Salvador 45:57
Trying very hard to resist the urge to be like, we have to scrap the Spycraft. We have to make a documentary about being like ancillary witnesses of the OJ trial now, and what their connections to video games are.
Simone de Rochefort 46:07
Yeah, I mean literally, if there's one thing I hope is-- no, it's not the only thing I hope is clear from this conversation, but if there's a thing I think is clear, it's that there are so many threads of this that we could be talking about for a five hour documentary, because there's so many people that I would have loved to be able to speak to, and so many threads I would love to pull on, and so many stories that are left to tell. And I think that that is true of so many video games from this era. And there's just so much that we could and should be talking about with video games from the '90s and from earlier that maybe have not been documented as well as we would all like. So that's again, I mean, why your podcast is awesome and also something that I'm very passionate about.
Phil Salvador 46:55
Well, I mean, yeah, it's something, you know, there are often folks who say, like, How do I become a video game historian? And you know, part of it's like, oh, find a thing you like and learn more about it. But part but part of it is also just like, No, go down that rabbit hole and show up 20 miles away and see where you are. And like, you know, there's always some fascinating, weird story like that the further out you get where it's like, Oh, what money was involved and what did this person do beforehand? I could go on many examples, I won't for the sake of time, but no, I think that is a really exciting, interesting part of video game history. And I'm glad we talked about this documentary, because I think it does a really good job sort of decentering the game almost from the conversation where, again, it is this human story of like, here's these two people who are involved in geopolitics, whose paths collide and they end up in a video game very briefly before one of them mysteriously dies. And yeah it's--
Clayton Ashley 47:45
Watch the documentary to find out why.
Phil Salvador 47:49
Is there anything we, like, that really stood out to you about this that we should have covered in the podcast, because we still have a little more time. I don't know if there's anything that like really we have not touched on that was a big part of either making this or that didn't make it into the documentary or--
Simone de Rochefort 48:02
Gosh, I guess I would just say one of the things that seemingly has come up in a lot of my responses is just emailing and calling people will get you so far if you are trying to tell a story like this, I know it sucks to hear. I hated emailing and calling people. It's hard for me every single day, but every time I actually buckled down and made myself send a cold email or make a cold call, something amazing came out of it, and I think that that is, you know, for people who are also doing this research, something that I hope will be valuable, you got to do it. You just got to do it. I'm so sorry.
Phil Salvador 48:42
We love to say here at the Video Game History Foundation that old guys love phone calls.
Simone de Rochefort 48:49
They do.
Clayton Ashley 48:49
They do
Phil Salvador 48:50
Yeah. They love getting a call and yeah, just slowly ambling through a story. It's great though. Like, we love the, as we call them, the old man conversations where they just, yeah, they just, like, talk about a thing, and then it's like, Oh yeah, and one time I was involved in, you know, the assassination of Bob Marley, or we're just, you know, a thing just comes up like that.
Simone de Rochefort 49:06
Which is conjectured conspiracy!
Phil Salvador 49:08
This is not a real thing that happened, folks. But no, that is a huge part of historical research. And, yeah, I mean, there's so many folks who, you know, everyone wants to talk to Shigeru Miyamoto. Nobody's talking to the intern at Activision, who was the photographer for the game, right? And like they often have so many other interesting stories when you try to tell history from the ground up like that. So that's the other advice to game histories, if you're trying to research a thing, talk to someone who was not necessarily the owner of the company. Given the weird circumstances, this would have been one where, yeah, talking to Bobby Kotick would have made sense. But it's still possible to tell a story without that. So good takeaway for aspiring historians, but I think that wraps it up. I think a little short of a Video Game History Hour this time, we covered a lot. We covered a lot of bread about this thing, and again, accommodating for the hour and a half pause where people went to youtube.com/polygon, and watchedthe Making of Spycraft documentary. Listen, Clayton, Simone, thanks so much for coming on. Oh! Simone, just made a gesture like Ah ha!
Simone de Rochefort 50:12
I do want to just shout out another website. So there is another, Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian also covered this game separately from us, and wrote this amazing two part post that came out in 2023, I believe. So that's at filfire.net, there's two parts about Spycraft. And he ended up tracking down and talking to someone that we didn't talk to it all who was Bob Bates, who was involved pre the final James Adams script that made it into the game. So there are some really cool insights there too. And so if people want to read more about that, you should read this, watch our documentary, and then go play the game, and you'll have a great sort of weekend ahead of you.
Phil Salvador 51:03
All right, folks. So Clayton, Simone, where can people find you? If people want to learn more, see more your work,
Simone de Rochefort 51:10
You can find me at youtube.com/polygon, and then I'm on most social media as DoomQuasar. If you care to do that, but you don't have to. I would just love it if you check out our videos over on the YouTube channel.
Clayton Ashley 51:27
I would also like you to check out our videos, because you can find me there, and you can also listen to me on my podcast, Temporal Culture War, which actually reminds me of something I should point out, which is that for this documentary, we were kind of astounded that this worked out. It was sort of a wish that turned out to come true. Our narrator is Jamelle Bouie.
Simone de Rochefort 51:52
Oh yeah, we didn't mention that.
Clayton Ashley 51:54
He is a New York Times columnist and a podcaster himself. And the reason I bring this up is that, if you like, Spycraft, the game, and this is sort of the reason we got him to be our narrator, is that his podcast is all about '90s, Cold War era movies, and their, specifically, their cultural context. He always intros every podcast talking about what was going on in the headlines of newspapers that day. And that idea actually inspired the podcast I do with my friend Mattie Lubchansky, Temporal Culture War is about the much maligned Star Trek Enterprise, which is interesting to me because it came out two weeks after September 11th. So it is also situated in an extremely interesting cultural time, and the podcast tries to make it, as much as it's about a Star Trek show, it's actually a lot about what was going on in American culture when it was releasing in 2001.
Phil Salvador 52:49
It's been a long road. I can't remember the rest of the lyrics of the song. If you want a good weekend, watch GoldenEye, play the Spycraft documentary and listen to both those podcasts and y'all, thanks so much for coming by the Video Game History Hour.
Simone de Rochefort 53:07
Thank you for having us.
Clayton Ashley 53:08
Thank you so much for having us. It's been a blast.
Frank Cifaldi 53:10
Thank you so, so much for listening to the Video Game History Hour. Brought to you by the Video Game History Foundation. If you have questions or comments for the show, you can email us at podcast@gamehistory.org. The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and all of your contributions are tax-deductible. You can support us right now by going to gamehistory.org/donate, or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, one word. This episode of the Video Game History Hour was produced by Robin Kunimune and edited by Michael Carrell. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith
