One Mailman's Quest to Save an Old Game's Reputation
push to talk #1 // feat. the memelord behind @Quest64Official
Welcome to the first ever issue of Push to Talk: A Strategy Guide for the Games Industry.
The newsletter highlights people doing interesting work in (or around) gaming as well as news links that are driving discussion and debate among games industry professionals. Let’s get into it.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The most-shared, most-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news and articles from the past week. For this first ever New Year Edition, I’m including a few older stories from over the Christmas break.
China’s Games Regulator Pulls a Punch - This was a very spicy three-part story that unfolded over the course of two weeks. First, China’s gaming regulator announced strict new limitations to monetization practices like lootboxes as well as outright bans on daily login rewards. Shares for Tencent, NetEase, and others plunged by tens of billions of dollars as a result. The very next day, Chinese regulators signaled that they might pull back on the proposed rule-changes. Finally, earlier this week Josh Ye at Reuters got the scoop that heads had rolled at the regulator. Feng Shixin, the head of the publishing unit of the Communist Party's Publicity Department (which regulates games) was removed from his role.
Derek Liu’s Favorite Game Trailers of 2023 - Anyone developing trailers for their games should familiarize themselves with the writing of Derek Liu. He’s written before about common mistake devs make in their trailers, and this list of his favorite trailers from 2023 has some great takeaways. (derek-liu.com)
Bossa Studios lays off one third of its staff - Layoffs were the big games industry story in 2023, and there are no signs yet that the trend will reverse in 2024. Nineteen employees were recently let go at Bossa. (GamesIndustry.biz)
Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games - This is from a few weeks back, but it’s absolutely wild. There are apparently about 100 full-time employees at the NYTimes games division?? And it’s growing fast. From the article: “As one Times staffer puts it: “The half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.” (Vanity Fair)
One Mailman’s Quest to Save an Old Game’s Reputation
In the hitherto extremely cursed realms of the 2020s, game devs of all stripes take it for granted that you need social media accounts to promote your game.
You know the routine. Your game is called Lighting Kittens, so you download Instagram/TikTok/X and try to reserve @LightningKittens, only to find that’s already claimed by somebody with an OnlyFans, so instead you reserve @PlayLightningKittens, except that breaks the character limit on X, so you settle on something vaguely embarrassing like @Lighting_K_Game.
At some point closer to launch, your community lead asks you what you’d like them to do with all these accounts, and you say something like “I don’t know… post some dank memes and maybe we’ll pop off?”
This, of course, is not a very good way to think about social media strategy. A well-run social account can help you reach new players and talk directly to your community. “Popping off” because of your dank shitposts is never something you can bank on.
But I know what you’re thinking: What about Fall Guys?? Or Cult of the Lamb?? Should we tell everyone that we’re going to add sex to the game?
And, sure: you can try to shitpost your way to social media prominence—but most of the time people aren’t going to follow your game’s account because of the dank memes. They follow because of their interest in the game itself: whether because it looks exciting, or seems like it’ll be the hot new thing, or because they’re already sold on the game and are desperate to learn more about it.
That’s the general rule.
Which brings us to a wonderful exception.
The Quest Begins
Quest 64 is a Nintendo 64 game originally released in 1998, and was the first ever RPG on the N64 in North America. It is sometimes namechecked by critics as one of the worst N64 games ever—although reviews at the time were more of an “ehh?” than anything else. IGN gave it a 5.9 out of 10. GameSpot went with 5.4. Kids these days might say that it was pretty mid.
In that blessed year, 1998, I personally purchased a copy of Quest 64 using my own hard-earned birthday money. I didn’t hate the game, but I found it to be pretty confusing and had trouble getting out of the first area. At some point I gave up, popped the cartridge out, went back to doing barrel rolls in Star Fox 64. Years went by, and I completely forgot that Quest 64 existed...
…until last year, when I was surprised—and intrigued—to encounter a Twitter/X account called @Quest64Official.
The account, while obviously not an official account, in almost every other way acted like your typical spicy unhinged brand account in the spirit of @steak_umm or @Wendys. It was posting anywhere between 3–5 times a day, mostly memes celebrating Quest 64 alongside retweets of positive comments and fan art inspired by the game.
And the thing about the memes was, they’re REALLY good:
When I first discovered this account, my initial theory was that this was someone doing a funny and subversive parody of the by now well-established archetype of the “unhinged social media manager.”
Then I had another idea: What if this is somebody who wants a job as a social media manager, and who’s doing this all as an elaborate résumé building exercise? (“Hire me! Look, what I can do on social even for a completely irrelevant 26-year-old game.”)
But why Quest 64? Of all the possible games?
I had to know. So I reached out via DMs and I asked him. Within hours, Quest64Official responded.
“I'm just a dude, a mailman from Wisconsin lol,” he said. “I do what I have to do to get people to notice my favorite game 😊.”
“So you unironically like Quest 64?” I asked.
In reply, he sent me the following picture, which I include here with his permission:
I stared at this image for a full minute before fully accepting what I was seeing: an actual shrine built in honor of Quest 64.
“It's not really one thing that makes Quest 64 special to me,” says Quest64Official, “more a combination of having and loving it as a teenager and then never being able to let go of that feeling (or love for the N64 really) later in life when I could afford to replicate that experience.”
For Quest64Official, Quest represents the power video games, when encountered at the right time, have to wow us—to leave a permanent impression.
“The last RPG I played before Quest 64 was Final Fantasy II on SNES,” he says, “and going from a 2D world to an open world 3D RPG was something I could have never prepared myself for emotionally. It was mind blowing to say the least. Having cities being the size of cities instead of the size of Cecil in FF2 on the overworld map was so cool. I was living in the game. And the music is incredible, earworms that I still whistle while I work today. A video game will likely never replicate the combination of things Quest did to me in 1998.”
Behind all the shitposting about Quest, he says, there’s a bigger mission that goes beyond this particular game. Quest64Official says he wants to help change the way people talk about games online, particularly by recognizing the value of games are often-neglected—they type that don’t get included in “best of all times” lists. Rankings and tier lists, he says, leave out the possibility for recognizing good in other places, and they can “lead to unfriendly discussion and negativity instead of celebration of games we love.”
For example, “There's good things about Superman 64,” he says. “It's okay to like the flying mechanics or the non ring levels or whatever without needing to say it's an awesome Nintendo 64 game. It's perfectly fine to like a handful of PSP games instead of regarding the entire library as trash.”
Quest64Official believes that some of the most negative online comments about games like Quest 64 or Superman 64 are what he calls "borrowed opinions.”
“Specifically, people echoing things about games they've never played,” he says, “which leads to more people doing the same. I'm passionate about people just being honest about what they like instead of being afraid to say things that will get them tore apart online.”
These high-minded aims aside, Quest64Official does sometimes post about his ultimate dream: inspiring a remake or sequel of Quest.
Could it work? Can shitposting save a game? Hard to say, but there are interesting omens in the air. Maybe it’s just the algorithms tricking me, but I’m starting to notice more and more Quest 64 mentions invading my social feeds. Popular YouTubers are calling for a revaluation of the game’s merits. Prominent art accounts have begun posting creative fan art of the game:
Who knows: Maybe 2024 will finally be the big year for Quest 64?
If so, we’ll know who started it.
A Quest64 remake would be named Questwich?