Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
62 M PS E . O R G scripts yet?" "Yeah, I'll get them to you tonight." I get them that night. Study them. The next morning, "Oh, here's your new scripts." Yeah, it's become such a huge industry. It's so much content now that even the writers are up until the last minute doing things. EM: What other changes have you noticed in the games industry over the course of your career? KZS: So, a common term that I use in directing is, "Just give me a razor blade right here." Everybody back in the day knew what that meant. I recently said that to an actress, "I just need a razor blade right there." and I guess I said it a few times during her session, and she goes, "Why do you keep talking about razor blades?" And I said, "Oh! You're this age, I've been in the business longer than you've been alive." We used to edit with razor blades on reel-to-reel tapes. So I think the terminology has just changed a bit. Also, the scope of projects has changed. I mean, Metal Gear was huge, but I don't even know how many lines our first Spider-Man was. Humongous amounts of content. But all the different genres still exist. You've got your action/ adventure, you've got your fantasy, you've got your comedy. All those still exist. The quality has gone up so much, and the amount of money put into making games has gone up so much over the years. They used to primarily be little pixels, and now they're feature film competitors. EM: I imagine you've worked with dozens of different engineers over the course of your career. What qualities stand out to you about the best engineers you've recorded with? KZS: I'm thinking of one person in particular, where he got to know what I liked and was already starting to put it together before I'd ask some of the time, and he also understood that I knew how to read wav files, so we had a really great connection. I'd go, "Scoot it back a little bit more. Yeah, it's that one." That was really fun. Just a fun guy to work with. You just get a rapport with people. We had one engineer a while ago, long gone now, who didn't like to listen to what I was requesting and would argue or give sass back. And needless to say, that relationship didn't last very long. EM: When you're deciding which new projects to take on, what do you find to be the most exciting thing about a new project at this point in your career? KZS: Well, some of the titles are pretty dang exciting. Past teams I've worked with often excite me. I have been working with a company called Camouflaj Games since I'd worked with their founder, Ryan Payton, for many years. Getting a Camouflaj project is always very exciting for me. The titles, I don't always know what it really is before we go into it. I was beyond thrilled when Insomniac asked me to do a Ratchet & Clank game with them, because I had worked on a Ratchet & Clank game many years before. And it was very successful, and then I had done some TV shows, Ratchet & Clank animated specials, and stuff like that over the years. I'd cast Armin Shimerman as Dr. Nefarious, and then after that I'd see Ratchet & Clank games come out and I'm like, "What's wrong? What happened? I wonder what the disconnect was." It turned out that the Insomniac here had never used an outside director before me. It was always done in house, which made a lot of sense because the people I worked with on the one that I did years ago were in North Carolina, so even if they were part of the same company, it was two different studios. So that finally answered the question. During Spider-Man sessions, Taking a break from recording dialogue for Marvel's Spider-Man with Yoav Litman, Kris Zimmerman Salter, Yuri Lowenthal, and Alyssa Galindo.