There was a long gap between episode 7 and 8 for the show. I lost my job and had to get a new one. I managed this feat about a week before my redundancy kicked in, thankfully, so that removed some of the pressure. But I struggled to get time to dedicate to creative endeavours due to training and adjusting to a new workload.
Around this time, the 1UP Pod gang got together to discuss the future of the show. It was getting harder and harder for people to find the time to dedicate to putting out content. I was in favour of putting the podcast to pasture, for the time being at least, because I was the sole editor and I knew I just couldn’t commit to that sort of workload. Editing four people talking for an hour is much more time consuming than me editing together a 40 minute audio play, weirdly. Once we all agreed to put the show on indefinite hold, I said I was going to take VGDM off as its own thing and everyone was very supportive.
My inital plan for the first episode of the new era was MGS vs Splinter Cell, once again. But that became tricky, logistically, as I wanted to record with my partner and we just didn’t have the spare time. A lot was going on in our lives and things just got too busy. So I decided to work on some stuff I could realistically do by myself. My first plan was Doom vs Wolfenstein, but I wound up writing myself into a more complicated production than I realised because I had an idea for a recurring joke that I loved too much to sacrifice, so I decided to develop that in the background while I plotted out a new idea – GTA.
I was massively rusty going into this. I had been sidelined for a while so felt hesitant about what I could feasibly pull off, when that had never been a barrier for me trying something before. I just needed to trust myself and write down whatever felt like a good idea. And then I started gathering together audio assets and I starts splicing together the ambience for the opening bar scene, and I remembered why I loved doing this series. Things got easier from there.
The recording started off a little rough, I was a little uncertain about things, lacking in any confidence. There are moments where I felt like I was feeling it again, but overall I felt like it was one of my weaker peformances. It got better as I went along, I made fewer mistakes, honed in on the deliveries that I wanted. It got easier, the story made more sense as I went along. Producing the sounds started to feel fun again. I decided to just live with the earlier stuff being a little ‘off’ rather than re-record because I’ve had so many issues with re-records where the sound quality or my energy are so wildly off the mark that it fucks everything else up (GOTY). And, in a way, the more nervous energy at the start made thematic sense because I was supposed to be an awkward newcomer to the life of crime.
I was happy with the analysis on offer; these are two games I know very well, so that all came to me fairly easily. Editing took way longer than I liked, my new job is far more intensive than the last one so I could not work on the side during a shift. I needed to finally just decide to dedicate a chunk of my free time to editing rather than playing Yakuza or Elden Ring for hours. But technical issues kept hitting me, like my editing software removing entire tracks of sound so I had to go through the whole episode and add sounds back. That didn’t help when I was literally minutes away from editing the finish of the episode and all set to move on to the next episode.
But I finally finished it and I was really happy in the end, so much so that I started work on the next episode immediately and started plotting out the next few months of games with entirely new ideas.
I was back, baby.