So, this episode, we actually had the idea for a long time ago.
So awesome to be here. Doing commentary. Just leave all that on.
Okay. Oh yeah. We're so excited to be here doing
commentary. We're trying different things to do. Talking
about our own work is something we just love so much that we're
we're trying to. But actually this show we did, we had the
idea to do this show for a long time because so many people in
our office played this game World of Warcraft including me.
Still to this day, I mean it's been out now for like
three years or something and people still a lot of people in
the office will walk by and instead of animating their
shot, they're playing World of Warcraft. At any one
point, in the office, there's either South Park characters on
all the monitors or World of Warcraft characters on all the
monitors. It pretty much is it's more World of Warcraft
actually and I really I mean World of Warcraft was a great
game and then did a lot of things for the industry but
like after about 20 hours of playing it, I was like, this is
kind of the same thing over and over again and I got bored with
it and did what you're supposed to do which is at some point,
stop playing it and do other things with your life. Yeah.
And have fun with it and then do other stuff. Even the, even
the people when we did this episode in conjunction with the
people of Blizzard, the people who actually, you know,
produced the game. And even they were like,
Boy, some of these people are losers that play this game all
the time. Even the people work for the company. But it was
cool. We came up with the idea and we're like a long time we
kinda we're talking about how do we do the animation within
the game cuz we didn't assume that Blizzard was gonna help us
out and so, you know, especially under our time
schedule, it's like, well, do we go in there and it just
looks like South Park? Because for us to do 3D stuff,
obviously, that takes a lot longer to do and we can't
do it in in our kind of time frame. Um so, we actually did a
lot of R and D we call it in the biz. Where we you know,
tried it with different ways of animating the
game and then finally, we came with the idea of like, let's
just ask Blizzard if they'll give us their characters and we
can put lip sync on them, you know, and then we can,
actually, it was pretty cool because the way that our show
works, the the software, all of our animators were able to
animate, just import their characters from the game and
then animate them and then a lot of the show is actually
just, we just had a round table full of people from Blizzard
and people from our office playing the game and then
sitting there directing was kinda like directing a live
action shoot. You're just sitting there going, okay,
everyone run over here and they would just all do it within the
game and we'd capture that and put it in the show and that
really that that helped us, you know, animate and having to
animate all those individually would have taken forever but
just doing it within the game. Which a lot of the most of the
times when you see the fighting, that's all actual
game being played. And obviously when people are
talking within the game and emoting, that's animation. Yeah.
But it was kinda it was it was a cool kinda crossover. It was
I'd say the people from Blizzard were on board from
the first. We thought there's no way they're ever gonna wanna
do this. Because you know, we have fun with World of Warcraft.
We are kinda saying that there are some people that play it
too much and stuff. You know, we didn't know if they wanted
to be a part of it and they were on board like immediately
and sent like really great people over that helped us.
It's actually totally pretty, it was pretty amazing
how cool they were about it. Yeah. But it was funny. We had,
I mean, we'd like every show, we hadn't really written the
whole show when we started it and so we're just messing
around. What the Blizzard people did was
basically they they had to start their own game. Start
their own server so that the people in the office and them
could all get on it and do what we need to do for the show and
at one point while we were doing that, this random
character just showed up and started running around trying
to kill people and and we're like, who is that? And they
said, we don't know. It's just someone logged in from
somewhere in the world who had found this server and was now
trying to screw up our shoot. It was so perfect. It was so
exactly what show was about and then at one point, one of the Blizzard
people says I'm gonna kill him and he did done this big super
high tech thing where he walked over and touched the guy and he
died and the other Blizzard people were like dude you can't
do that. Like you can't you can't kill other players like
that. It's not cool and like this big ethical thing about
how they you know what they because they are high up on the
Blizzard chain. They're not allowed to go in and serve.
They have like a death touch. They they know the secret hack
to go like death touch anybody but when you use death touches
highly controversial. Yeah. Like when that's when that's
okay to do. So fascinating to watch the whole thing and so a
lot of the banter in the show came out of that too. I would
love to have death touch and just go around and kill people
in World of Warcraft. Um that's enough about that probably. That's
enough about World of Warcraft