YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Beck

lines on the record
59
first
2020-12-14
most recent
2020-12-14
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yeah, and part of the reason is development is incredibly difficult, and especially building an MMO at the time because technology, the ability to build an online game is kind of like building a rocket ship where you have to build a game engine and a massive tool pipeline to put assets into the game. You have to be able to build a whole set of server technologies that can scale to support thousands of simultaneous players all running around the world. So just the technology effort is incredibly difficult. And then from a content and gaming perspective, you have to build a world. You needed to make it feel incredibly good to walk around the world. You needed to have a story arc and character classes and races and cities with political history that it all makes sense. And then the game has to be fun. So you have to be able to understand and build systems where it feels good to move and the sound effects and the visual effects are great and the combat mechanics, which is the math behind the game, all make sense and you want to play it for a long time.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Ultimately, they ended up failing And sort of a good lesson, I think, for us where we learned, sort of got to see up close that you can have a right idea and be in the right place at the right time. But if you can't execute well, it doesn't matter.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And to me, this was an example of Brandon magic where he hears about this company, cold calls the CEO, the CEO agrees to be like, yeah, come out. And so Brandon flies out to Arizona, meets the CEO, and CEO is like, oh my God, you're a kid. You're like, what the hell? But then Brandon convinces him to be like, hey, but how can I be helpful? Like, there's no downside. So, can I get your materials? Comes back, shares them with me. And then we start brainstorming on just other ways to plug in or add value and sort of just finding ways again to add advice or things like that or connect them with anybody we know that may be interested, things like that.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, that's when I was done with banking and I went to work for a company called Advanced Telecommunications and Brandon worked at Bain& Company as a strategy consultant. And our lives at the time really consisted of going to work or coming home and playing games. We had back-to-back gaming rigs. And anytime we had free time, like that's all we wanted to do. And it was kind of in that context with which we started to explore different ideas about where the game industry was going.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “The basement of Levy Library like late one night, and we started working on this rough business plan. Neither of us really knew how to build a business plan, so we're trying to figure out what that looked like and what to put on paper and all this. And we kind of never really win anywhere with that business, but nonetheless being really energized about the possibilities of the future. And again, that's just something that I think Brandon really helped awaken in me was this ability to look at not the way the world is currently, but the way that it could be and how we could potentially go help change it.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, no, we did, but it was sort of accidental in some ways. Brandon and I, because of our shared passion in games and then also our mutual interest in business, we would strategize or brainstorm or think about opportunities. And this is one of the reasons that I was attracted to Brandon is because he was sort of the most entrepreneurial and sort of business-minded friend that I had. Brandon ran a music station at SC and you'd be thinking about events or stuff like that. And so we were playing games and we both loved online games. And so we loved to like watch replays of really competitive players playing online and to help inform how we could get better. And that started us thinking about, well, maybe we could help create or run some gaming tournaments. Maybe we could do some stuff like that just around campus. And actually, maybe there's a business opportunity. Maybe we should create a league that we were going to call the UGL, an ultimate gaming league. And so, you know, Brandon and I went down.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, I mean, we stayed in touch and we'd call each other every once in a while. We'd play some games. I remember one of those phone calls, Mark told me I really had to see the Matrix. I was like, what is that? He's like, you'll see. Ended up blowing my mind and being my favorite movie of all time.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I remember meeting Brandon, and I'm like, oh, you're from Los Angeles. Awesome. You know, like, oh my God, you like video games? What's up? And so we just kind of instantly hit it off. And then as I got to know him, I also just really thought he had an infectious personality. I thought he had really interesting way of looking at the world. It was just, it was sort of complimentary from a values perspective to mine. And he had just this incredibly entrepreneurial and kind of business-oriented mind that kind of inspired me where I'm like, wow, I've never seen, I never encountered a person that's also younger than me that felt so vibrant and dynamic in this interesting way. And so because of the shared love of game, so we could hop on the modem and play StarCraft or Warcraft 2 or Diablo or Duke Nukem 3D. I could go on and on about the titles that we all knew and connected about.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Not only do you have to build an incredibly fun game, which is really hard, by the way, there's a lot of really difficult problems to solve there, where it has to work and the system has to scale and it has to be able to update and the balance of the game from a math perspective needs to be incredibly precise. You need the content to be compelling where people fall in love with the characters in the way that somebody would for Batman or any of their favorite superheroes. And so there's so many things that you have to get right. Again, it's like Brandon and I sort of joke that knowing what you know now, we wouldn't have invested in ourselves back then.”

    2020-12-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT