S1E4: An ARG Developer and Player Meet for the First Time - Niles Sankey & Matthew Bliss

Feb 27

[Dial-up modem connection sounds]
[Vintage AOL "You've got Mail" voice transitions into the voice of a digital monster]:
Welcome. You've got… Digital Folklore.

Announcer Voiceover:
Previously on Digital Folklore ...
Perry:
I'm not really big on pawn shops at all.
Todd (the mysterious pawn shop owner):
I'll let you take it complimentary if you want to buy a Game Boy.
Perry:
Who are you?
Todd:
I'm Todd.
Mason:
This is Todd's shop.
Todd:
I'm a collector of sorts.
Dr. Sara Cleto:
A folk group can be as little as two people or 100 or something, or even more, who all share something.
Niles Sankey:
I'm Niles Sankey, I worked on the game Assemblance.
Matthew:
Oh hey, Niles.
Mason:
What?
Niles Sankey:
Oh hey, Matthew. What's up?
Perry:
You two know each other?
Matthew:
I was just one of the main Discord uses that was involved in unwrapping some of the mysteries.
Mason:
I bought a bike at a pawn shop because I'm an adult.
Hey, did you leave a light on?
Perry:
Huh?
Mason:
Yeah. Is there a light in your trunk or something?
Perry:
Yeah, wait, maybe I left it... I don't think, let me... Wait!?!!?!!!

[Perry and Mason scream an abrupt little scream]
Todd (in a menacing Eldritch voice):
I told you to keep your eyes open. You never know what you might discover. [maniacal laughter]

[Back to present day. Mason is at home… confused. Trying to piece together what happened.]
Mason:
So if Todd's closes at 8:00 PM and we couldn't have been there for more than 15 minutes after the whole thing closed. So I don't... Oh, hold on. Yeah. Come in. Door's open.
Perry:
All right.

[door opening sound as Perry enters]
Mason:
Oh, hey Perry.
Perry:
(sounding hesitant) You're here. That's good.
Mason:
(sounding equally hesitant)
Yeah.
And you're here, which is good.
How are you doing?
Perry:
How are you doing?
Mason:
Well, I'm fine. Well, I'm good. I'm good actually. I'm good. You?
Perry:
I'm pretty good. I was just wondering... Nope, I was in the area.
Mason:
Perry, you live like 80 miles away. What are you doing in this area?
Perry:
Yeah. All the other grocery stores were closed and I had to go a little bit further, I think.
Mason:
What?
Perry:
(obviously making up excuses on the fly… badly)
Yeah, stores were closed. I had to do some shopping 80 miles away. It's perfectly normal.
Mason:
Okay.
Perry:
I knew that you lived close by and I know we didn't have anything scheduled and I really just felt like seeing if everything was okay.
Mason:
You don't remember anything, do you.
Perry:
No.
Mason:
Okay. Yeah. Me neither.
Perry:
All right.
Mason:
Okay.
Perry:
All right. So...
Mason:
The last thing I remember is we left Todd's, I got the bike and then I woke up.
Perry:
The last thing I remember - Oh, and I did, when I realized I woke up and had this whole missing time thing.

… I did check my skin for microchips. Have you done that yet?
Mason:
No, I did not.
Perry:
And any unidentifiable marks.
Mason:
Thanks, Perry. Thanks for a new anxiety.
Perry:
Anyway, the last thing I remember was something about the trunk. We had got your bike. We had met Todd and seen that really weird room that he had, and saw Matthew and Niles. And then I remember bike and trunk.
Mason:
You had a light on. You had a light on in your trunk.
Perry:
I mean, I didn't have a light on, but there was a light coming from my trunk.
Mason:
Yep.
Perry:
And then darkness. And then I woke up and yeah. No microchips, but I'm...
Wait.
How’s Digby?
Mason:
Digbi’s fine, I think.
Perry:
Are you sure he is not watching us?
Mason:
Well, he is always watching us.
Perry:
No, he looks creepier than the last time I saw him.
Mason:
Perry, I don't know how long it's going to take you to get used to my pet raccoon, but at some point you're just going to have to accept Digbi for who he is.
Perry:
(half-whispering) Watching us.
Mason:
Yeah, he's a raccoon. He has nothing else to do. All he does is watch us and eat stuff off the floor.
Perry:
He's freaking creeping me out, man.
Mason:
Okay. Digbi, go in the other room. Perry doesn't like you. Wow. Now, okay, now is he creepy or is he sad? Because he looks sad to me.
Perry:
He's a good actor.
Mason:
So, well, two things. One, I would appreciate it if sometime that you show up and come over you don't bully me about the way I live. And two, did you look back in your trunk after all of that? Have you checked?
Perry:
Number one. I'm sorry for seeming like a bully about the crap that you have around here.
Mason:
You did it again.
Perry:
It's not the way that I would choose to live, but it's fine for you, apparently. So I'm good with that. I'm not going to bully you about the crap… or your lifestyle… or your eating habits… or your cleanliness… or lack of cleanliness… or who you choose to spend your time with whose name starts with D and end with Y…
Mason:
It's actually an ‘I’, but okay.
Perry:
It would be. Anyway. Trunk. I've not thought to check the trunk since I got home last night at a time that I don't remember getting home or waking up this morning and not remembering anything else. I've just been a little bit freaked out and preoccupied.
Number one. I didn't want to check on you, but I felt like I had to in order to be able to put this together…
Mason:
Oh, I do appreciate that. That is nice.
Perry:
Number two…
…there is no number two…
Mason:
Okay. There is no number two. Why don't we... You drove here, right?
Perry:
I did drive here. Why don't we go check?
Mason:
This is a new car.
Perry:
It is a new car.
Mason:
Nice.
Perry:
Yeah. I'm afraid that it's been tainted now though.
Mason:
Ah, I don't know. It's a Beamer. They're always kind of tainted. Pop the trunk.
Perry:
Yeah, we'll pop the trunk. Hey, I don't remember...
Mason:
Is this mine? Is this one of mine?
Perry:
Oh this-
Mason:
Or did you finally give in? Get a real reel player, this is just a standard half inch tape.
Perry:
No, I didn't. Mine's still...
Mason:
This isn't one of mine. This says Niles and Matthew on it.
Perry:
Well, we talked to Niles yesterday.
Mason:
And Matthew. Niles was the guy who made that Assemblance, the video game and the ARG in it. I remember talking to them at Todd's pawn shop.
Perry:
In that weird room.
Mason:
Yeah.

Perry:
I don't remember putting it in the trunk.
Mason:
Well, let's check it. I got all my gear out.

Perry:
You brought your gear out here?
Mason:
No, it's in my house. It's just out. It's on the table. Like all of the rest of my stuff. I'm sure you noticed. Come on.
Perry:
Yeah. I don't know how attached you are to your stuff. I didn't know if you had an alarm system and just carry it around with you.
Mason:
The alarm system is basically that you can't walk through here without knocking at least a few things over. And I'm pretty sure I'd notice because I also sleep here.
Perry:
Oh, your alarm system is Digbi and he sleeps on the job.
Mason:
He's a part of it. Let me spool this up. Let's see what this is.
[Mason presses PLAY... Tape artifacts and patterns of static can be heard as the tape spins up]
Matthew Bliss:
How bout if we just put that at the start and then the next bit at the end… and when they start hitting that timestamp right in the middle, I think. Yeah, I think they're really going to like that. What do you reckon Niles?
Niles Sankey:
What are we talking about? Sorry.
Matthew Bliss:
That's right. That's the attitude that we want.
Perry:
I don't remember any of this.
Mason:
Let's just let it play.

[Tape clicks as Mason presses PLAY again]
Matthew Bliss:
Look, I think this thing has come together really well. We've got experience together having done some stuff with Assemblance. It's really funny, the work that I do, having had to be remote work for a long time, I felt like that was remote working, but I think the stuff that we've been tick-tacking off each other for the last few years has been the actual remote work. It's been really interesting to feel like I've got a relationship with you even though we've never actually met until this point. And something that I really want to know from you is how you felt about this because again, it's really hard to get in touch with you sometimes. And I know that's because you do a lot of travel for your work and you're not contactable. But what's your feeling about the Assemblance Discord stuff after Oversight? Because I don't think there was much for the first game was there?
Niles Sankey:
I barely knew what Discord was until Assemblance, which is funny. And now it's so critical to game development and building communities. That Discord community and channel felt like it just grew organically, at least from my perspective. I think when it comes to a lot of game development, these days, developers are very conscious to actually, well, we need a Discord channel. And that has to be said information and it has to be cultivated, and that's part of our marketing channels, et cetera. But the nice thing about the Assemblance Discord is it took on life of its own, which is what I was hoping that the game would at least do in some capacity, and it would take on life of its own in a way that nobody really knew where the game came from or from my perspective, where the Discord came from.
So when I started to see that there was this Discord community and I was linked to it, I was like, oh my God, look at this. Looks like this exists. Where did this come from? And because of the anonymous nature of the internet or Discord, it's not clear. It was this organic creation. And that was just this beautiful payoff from what I was hoping the game would be. And I didn't know how the Assemblance could achieve this, but I wanted the Assemblance to feel like, in a sense, the Chamber and the AI, how it's a living entity and you don't quite understand how it works. And I was hoping that it would take on a mind of its own in a weird way, discord delivered on that. And so that was a weird, humbling, unexpected and completely awesome experience to have.
Matthew Bliss:
How often were you in there? Because that's something that none of us were sure of.
Niles Sankey:
Quite often, but the other people that helped me, I had one writer that I worked with at Bungee, actually. And then my cousin, who's an audio producer, super talented audio producer, but more works in the music scene of Seattle. But we always jammed on or collaborated on these ideas of sending out these emails that are part of the ARG. And then my cousin actually did the hard work, the work of actually setting up the emails and then we would just monitor, I can't remember exactly when we found Discord. And I think, I don't know if it was before or after the launch of Oversight, but in any case, when we realized it existed and this was our main conduit into the community, I was very clear we do not present ourselves as real people. We're not developers. We're just observing. And because again, I tried to reinforce this, nobody really 100% knows where this game came from or what it is and who made it. That's why there's no credits in the game. There is credits, but they're contextually hidden in the game.
Matthew Bliss:
I played the first one and found those credits again.
Niles Sankey:
Those credits, yeah.
Matthew Bliss:
In the office.
Niles Sankey:
And I went so far to not even... I don't even think my name is even on there, I was very insistent that my name not appear anywhere in the game, just as a spiritual reason to get behind this idea. If other people weren't going to have their name that worked on the game front-facing like normal credits, I was like, well, then I have to just remove my name completely. But it was a part of that effort to remain anonymous and let the game be its own thing. And so we were always watching Discord once we knew that existed, but we were just purposely silent and just watching. We didn't want to disrupt the life that had been created.

[Perry – confused – hit’s the stop button on the reel-to-reel]

Perry:
This is an interview.
Mason:
I mean yeah, apparently. Unless they just talk like that.
Perry:
So Matthew orchestrated some kind of weird interview without us around?
Mason:
I mean yeah, it seems like it.
Perry:
I don't know where your head is with this, but this feels like something bigger to me.
Mason:
Perry. I know a lot of weird stuff has happened, but dude, I don't-
Perry:
This entire thing could have been set up. Todd knew your dad and apparently knew you and so he knows you wouldn't pick up that bike for a few days. I mean, all that to say this. Basically they're up to something and we've played right into their hands.
Mason:
Yeah. Perry, Hey, how about, and maybe this is a wild idea, but why don't we just finish listening to the tape before we start jumping down rabbit holes?
Perry:
I mean, good point. There may be some clues in there. You never know what we might find if we just keep our eyes and ears open. Go ahead and hit play.

[Sound of Mason pressing play on the reel-to-reel]
Matthew Bliss:
Oh, definitely. One of the big things about it felt like we were clamoring for things with each other, but that there was really no interaction except during Oversight anyway, during using the Instagram. Actually it was really just the Instagram, wasn't it? it's been a few years now, but that was where a lot of the red herrings came out for the second one. But actually that's where you shouted out the community too. You were an Instagram in influencer at the beginning.
Niles Sankey:
Was I? I don't even-
Matthew Bliss:
I think so.
Niles Sankey:
I guess it's possible. I don't remember, actually.
Matthew Bliss:
Well look, I think a lot of the stuff that you did also influenced, or may have been influenced by a lot of games that I've discovered recently that have a similar fourth wall bending kind of thing to it, which I think I have to thank you for because Assemblance was the first of those games that flipped the lid on how game design can be and how the experience can be as well. I'm curious what you've played since making those games that might give you similar feelings. And the first one that comes to my mind is Immortality, the Sam Barlow game that came out this year. Have you had a chance to play that one yet?
Niles Sankey:
No, I'm taking notes though.
Matthew Bliss:
Oh, okay, good.
Niles Sankey:
I feel like I'm getting either old or something where I don't really play a lot of games and so...
Matthew Bliss:
Happens to all of us. I'm doing a video game news podcast at the moment, or kind of at the moment, I need to restart for this year, but I'm finding that there's less and less time for video games and if you can't play the subject matter of a thing you're doing a podcast about, it feels a little bit weird. It's an odd place to be in. I suppose it'd be even weirder if you make games and you can't play games.
Niles Sankey:
Yeah, I mean I feel that way going into this about ARGs. I'd never designed anything like that. I was at companies where they had done stuff like that, but I wasn't involved with that. So a lot of this, I think I may have mentioned this in the previous interviews, but a lot of those puzzles or ideas were thrown together so fast. And I was like, I don't even know if this is going to work or what this is. And I think, like I said, I was working with Eric, the writer, and Adam, my cousin, and even they, I think were like, what is he talking about?
And it's like, I don't know, but I think it could work. The interesting thing about these types of puzzles, and you spoke to it where, and I've heard this from multiple people that have played it somewhere and swear, I think these types of puzzles play tricks on the mind. And I'd say 90% of what the results are, are you're the human mind or your mind building thoughts and constructing a game out of just these hints or these leads that are given that they don't have to be very deep, but if you ask the right questions, even with a very simple human brain, I think, constructs makes these complex thought processes and debates in its mind, didn't really know what I was doing, but it does demonstrate the power of these sort of subjectives, cryptic questions and puzzles.
Matthew Bliss:
Well, that's what you have to call the third game probably, Emergence.
Matthew Bliss:
Emergence.
Matthew Bliss:
Yeah. So many game designers try to get emergent game design. And when you think emergent game design, you probably think GTAV in the first instance,
Niles Sankey:
Right, yeah.
Matthew Bliss:
Because you can be whoever you want to be. If you've created a game potentially by accident that has us knitting together threads to create a massive story that we've created ourselves, that's like true emergence I think
Niles Sankey:
It's a good description. Yeah, I think that's a good word to describe what I was attempting to describe.
Matthew Bliss:
You definitely hit it with Oversight, but maybe you were just giving it a test run with Assemblance because I think the number of red herrings in that second game is just immense. This is getting really close to the things that I want to ask you and talk to you about, which is the things that you probably won't want to talk about on a podcast recording. But the big one that everyone seems to have an opinion about is the woman. The woman who seems to be the emergence within the emergence, and would probably describe it as the horror element of the game because it's the only real bit that gives you those chills. Not to mention you created a game around the same time as the release of PT with a corridor that has a changing environment and that you are going through constantly all the time. Was that something that you thought about actually?
Niles Sankey:
Oh yeah. PT is probably the biggest influence on Assemblance. That was a game changer for me in terms of design and simplicity and just, yeah, PT is brilliant in a lot of different ways. It was a teaser, but I consider those things games, obviously I think that's probably not a controversial statement. It's supposed to be a demo. I consider that one of my favorite games ever. Beyond the pure horror, it's the scariest piece of media I think I've ever experienced, movie or game. It's just the first time I played it, I couldn't sleep for a couple nights. Just very disturbing feeling. But certainly the genius of, wow, they made a full experience out of the hallway. I mean obviously there's little extra tweaks to that, but I couldn't believe it. And yeah, it was very inspiring, let's say.
So Assemblance is part PT in part Stanley Parable. Those are the two pieces of art that I just was very inspired by at the time. Obviously revisiting these rooms over and over comes from PT and I was like, well, maybe there's a slightly different way to do it. And wrap a fictional wrapping around that that's slightly different, disguise that. Towards the end there was all these analyses on how to unlock the... I can't remember what they were trying to unlock. Maybe it was the trailer itself or Silent Hills at the time, Silent Hills, but something about screaming into your microphone and all this crazy stuff he had to do. And I was like, that's so cool. And Stanley Parable did kind of similar things, just a different flavor. But yeah, those two, if you take that and just put some David Lynch on top of it, that's all it says.
Matthew Bliss:
There was a point in the game in Oversight as I was playing it, where we couldn't progress with, as a community because we needed more clues from you to be able to unwrap the things, to be able to continue with whatever was going on. And there was a very weird ending that I got, that seemed like a broken mashup of a bunch of different endings, or not endings, but transitional things strung together. And I can't remember if I contacted you or if I contacted the community and shared it and someone had responded, I think I might have even sent it to the Carta Besta email about what it actually was. If it was a bug with the game or if it was a ghost in the machine or what was going on with it.
And I think at the time you said it was a bug or someone did, and that it was going to be updated out or something like that, which made me think that because we didn't have enough clues from you as part of the ARG outside of the game portion, we wouldn't have been able to progress with the game anyway. But that maybe you were gating some portions of the game with updates so that people couldn't data mine the information to get at the end game before anyone actually got there. So did you actually do that?
Niles Sankey:
So the short answer is yes, there were all these updates at the end or right after release, no, I don't remember the specifics. And I think I was doing almost daily updates and it was a total crazy nightmare because at the time it was PC, I think Steam and PlayStation, PS4. And so PS4 is, this is going to go into some technical game design stuff, but the consoles in general are just difficult to ship on. It's different. Steam's very easy to update. Not only is PlayStation 4 very difficult to update, especially Patch, at the time Patching was so difficult. There was the American region and then there was the Europe slash Australian region. And I had players on both sides. And so I had to come up with a system where... Because I needed to put out updates, but I had to come up with a system where I did this as fast as possible and then everybody got the update at the same time.
That was a nightmare. But it got to a point where I was like, I think this would be really cool if I could keep updating it and there'd be new things and the community had a couple weeks where there was just new things being released. I can't remember exactly how it went down, but yes, there was a bunch of updates that happened and that was me scrambling behind the scenes. Absolute just crazy situation of trying to cook all these different builds and then time everything and upload it. By some miracle it worked. And I'm definitely certain that the thank-you ending of Assemblance of Oversight was not in the original releases.
I've always tried to make these games to be like, they'll never solve this puzzle and it'll go on for weeks or months. And then the white shift of the first game, I can't believe that that was solved in, what was it? A week or two. I was like, I don't even think they'll ever figure this out, but maybe I can present this game where people know there's one last puzzle, but they never can quite figure it out. It's just so complex. But then it just got solved. George, Blue Ranger solved it. And so for the second one I was like, well, I threw in a bunch more puzzles, but maybe we can still achieve this thing where there's just so many different paths that it'll go on for a while. And it never does because people are just so smart and resourceful.
It's like, how did they figure that out? I would never be able to figure that out. And sometimes when I go back, I was looking at, I can't remember why, but oh, I had to put the game on Epic Store and I was like, well, I need to test this to make sure it all works. And I was like, how do you solve these puzzles again? I'm like, I'm sure I can remember and or I can look at the clues. And I was like, what? I don't even remember. What is this? And then I'm looking online and I'm like, what the hell? How did people do this? People are insane. They're so smart. And I was always hoping that the content would carry people longer and then people would catch up in a few days and I'm like, I think we need more because there's a lot of momentum here and if it stops here, people are going to be disappointed. So let me just throw in more and more content, make it even more obscure and more obscure. And that's what was going on at the time.
Matthew Bliss:
I don't think any of us that know the game well enough would say that the white shift is the end, because there's always more. The bit that you did at the end of Oversight where we got the white shift, which is the bit that we were conditioned to see, the portrait of the child. And then you flashed three documents up talking about three different global locations, and how long do you think it was before some of us were like, oh, I live in Nevada, there's a Biosphere over there. I can go to that location and check it out and all that kind of thing. The tour gate in Japan, I don't think we had anyone Japanese in the community, but I think that was the worst thing you could possibly do or the best thing, to create more emergent discussion at that point.
Niles Sankey:
Yeah. We toyed with the idea of doing a real world ARG and having something buried in the ground. We were so close to doing that and it was just a little bit too much. And also, yeah, it's like, do we want to be sending people in real places? What if they're going places that they got the longitude and latitude wrong and they're in some dangerous locations? So I mean, I guess that's the nature of ARGs, right? But the real reason I guess we didn't was it was just so hard to ship the game as is. And we really wanted to do some real world stuff, but we just didn't have the resource, I guess, or time to do it.
Matthew Bliss:
That's all right. But now Inscription has managed to do that. They had buried the floppy disk that has the Inscription game on it, and then some fans went out and-
Niles Sankey:
That's awesome.
Matthew Bliss:
Yeah, the guy who made it went out there and gave them some merch or something. So it was very low impact.
Niles Sankey:
Yeah, heard about this as well.
Matthew Bliss:
You might just need to sequester yourself for a month and just power through all these.
Niles Sankey:
Yeah, indeed. Yeah.
Matthew Bliss:
Now the thing that I want to bring up with you is the idea that Assemblance, when it was released, I think it really got shortchanged in the games media, the review space. I actually discovered it by watching people on Giant Bomb reviewing it and going through that initial instance. And I thought, yeah, that looks like my cup of tea. But invariably the discussion around it was, wow, this is a great one-hour-long experience with nothing in it. I want you to know that I think they were completely wrong. And I've been on a mission for maybe the last couple of years to try and talk about it as much as I can to try and un-fill the mystery that belied underneath. But I really hope that after that stuff, I mean clearly you didn't, because you made Assemblance Oversight, but I really hope that that kind of stuff didn't really impact the way that you felt like you put the game together, because it was incredibly good.
Niles Sankey:
Very much appreciate that. It's complicated, anytime you produce art, there's going to be criticism. Yeah, it's interesting. There's two ways to look at it with Assemblance. I think it's something like 99.9 some percent of indie games don't make more than X number of sales or dollars. And so it's weird because Assemblance is in that highest... I can't remember what the percentage is, but Assemblance is in a very high echelon of success. But yet even within that high echelon, there's such a broad spectrum. And so it's kind of a mixed thing. And it doesn't really... Some of the reviews are always painful. There were definitely reviews where...
I think I remember when we just first released the game and this was before any of the original streamers, and we just watched this one person playing it, and it was barely known at the time, and he plays through it and 40 minutes or 50 minutes later, whatever, how long it takes to do that initial cycle, he gets to the end and it's not the real end, or it's the basic ending. And he's like, he says, "God, that's it? That's ridiculous." And he just was like, "This game sucks." And I looked at my cousin because we put so much work into it and we just laughed and like, wow, I guess we didn't do it. Oh well, let's go grab a coffee.
It's just the type of thing that over the years as a game developer, you just get used to, or an artist, I'm sure any artist, I'm sure you can appreciate it as well. It's just part of the trial that you go through to be a creative. I will say when it came to Assemblance, that was the bottom. From there on out, it was awesome. And then watching George, Blue Ranger do that first white shift run, I think I was watching it live. That made up for any kind of little snide, silly, shallow remarks made by anybody else. And I don't mean to suggest that their criticism wasn't valid for them. That wasn't the game for them. That's totally fine. But in any case, that is so easy to forget. What's happened since then with streamers, and then it even blew up bigger with the Discord server. And here I am talking with you, meeting you after all these years, like Assemblance is still, for me as a creator, just paying off in these really wonderful ways that to transcend sales figures and those measures of success.
Matthew:
Now, was that enough Red Herrings for a little ARG?

[Sound of Mason pressing stop on the reel-to-reel]
Mason:
Well, I don't remember any of that.
Perry:
No.
Mason:
But it was interesting.
Perry:
It was interesting. But it also seems like they're trying to tell us something. I mean-
Mason:
Yeah, I don't know what sort of game they're playing at, but...
Perry:
Clearly they're trying to send a message. I don't know if I like it.
Mason:
I think they might just be messing with us because we were asking them all those questions about ARGs. But the thing I don't like is that they snuck it into your trunk and that we don't remember anything. And this doesn't really answer any questions about that or any questions about Todd's place.
Perry:
No, it doesn't. But I'm going to go get a burner phone and leave him creepy voicemails.
Mason:
Sure, man. You do you. I was thinking we could just go talk to Todd.
Perry:
Sure.
Mason:
I mean, the other thing we could do, and this just occurred to me, this might be a wild idea, but we could just forget that this ever happened and move on.
Perry:
Yeah, that's an option.

[Theme music kicks in for end credits]

Perry:
Thanks for listening to Digital Folklore.
Mason:
If you're enjoying the show, subscribe to or follow us in your favorite podcast app.
Perry:
Check out our website at digitalfolklore.fm, and you can also find us on Twitter at DigiFolklorePod and Facebook at Digital Folklore Pod.
Mason:
A special thanks this episode to Niles Sankey of Nilo Studios. He's an interactive experience designer in the gaming industry since 1999 with a lot of projects under his belt. And you can play the games mentioned in this episode, Assemblance and Assemblance Oversight on PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, or the Nintendo Switch right now.
Perry:
And also thank you to Matthew Bliss, avid ARG solver. Also, Matt hosts the Dead Drop Podcast. It's a phenomenal 10 minute twice weekly podcast featuring video game news, analysis, and industry insights. It is incredibly succinct, well researched and highly digestible. A great show for anyone interested in keeping up with the gaming world.
Mason:
And if you haven't listened to the previous episode of Digital Folklore, we talk more with Matt and Niles, as well as some other experts and some characters about folk groups, haunted video games, creepy pastas, alternate reality games and more. You should give it a listen.
Perry:
Oh, and check the show notes. Always check the show notes for relevant links, references, information on our guests and more.
Mason:
Digital Folklore is distributed by Realm and is a production of Eighth Layer Media.
Perry:
Thanks for hanging out with us, and we'll catch you next time.
Mason:
Oh… and Digbi says, you should check out our Patreon at https://patreon.com/digitalfolklore.
Click to download a fully formatted PDF version of this episode’s transcript.

Perry and Mason have lost time, but discover a mysterious tape...

The gang discovers a mysterious canister in the trunk of Perry’s (new) car. It's a reel of tape, which turns out to be an interview that they did not conduct.

Tune in as Matthew Bliss (prominent ARG solver of Asemblance) and Niles Sankey (game developer of Asemblance) meet each other for the first time!

Niles dives deeper into his approach in creating the mysterious puzzles behind his game Asemblance, the experience of watching a community come together to solve it, and shares a lot of insight into the world of creating video games.

Guests: