About twenty years ago, when I was in the Saturday show at the ACME Comedy Theatre, a friend of mine who I wrote with for the show encouraged me to check out one of her students who was in the Sunday show.
I remembered when she and I were in the Sunday show, how exciting and validating it felt when the upperclassmen in the Saturday show came to watch us. I knew that some of the Sunday show performers would be moving into the Saturday show soon, and I wanted to see who I would possibly be writing with or for in the coming months.
So I went to the show, and this woman who my friend told me about was absolutely hilarious. In a show that had a solid lineup of great sketches, she stood out to me. So I made a note that this was someone I wanted to do comedy with, and I started making little notes in my book when ideas arrived.
We never did a Saturday show together, as circumstances outside of our control did their thing, but … oh, I don’t know, maybe around six months later, or so? Less than a year, at least. It isn’t important. At some point after that, my friend, Kim, emailed me about a show she had done with that woman we both loved. It was a little thing they did for five bucks, without asking for permission, entirely on their own. It was about gamers who played something like WoW, meeting up in person for the first time, and they are all the most outrageous characters you’ve ever seen. She thought that I’d love it. She asked me to take a look at it, and maybe post about it on my blog, if that felt right. I looked at it, thought it was so funny and so original, and couldn’t write a post about it fast enough.
For the one of you in the world who hasn’t yet gotten there: The show was The Guild, and the brilliant woman in the Sunday show was Felicia Day.
About a year later, I’d met Felicia a few times, and though we weren’t yet friends, I admired and respected her immensely. I loved how she was doing what she wanted to do, on her terms, entirely supported by the audience she was building one person at a time. Think back to 20 years ago, it’s 2006, and everything is growing online. Indie creators doing indie projects were starting to rewrite popular media and popular culture for a generation. I was a tiny part of that as an Ur-blogger, and Felicia was an enormous part of that as the creator of The Guild (and future founder of Geek and Sundry). It was such an exciting time! We all felt like power was shifting away from gatekeepers, entertainment was getting more diverse, and creative nerds were ascendant. God, I miss that.
After one season, I had become a legit fan of The Guild. I loved the story, I thought the actors were hilarious (I could listen to Jeff Lewis be aggrieved for a thousand hours), and I was just so fucking excited to see someone I didn’t really know, but who I was very aware of, doing truly great, transformative work. It was inspiring as hell to me, and I loved having a front row seat to all of it.
Around this time, Felicia reached out and asked if she could take me to coffee and pitch me a role in season 3. I could have saved us the drive and the cost of some VERY bougie coffee and just said “I’m in and don’t need to hear anything else,” but I like coffee and I wanted to sit down with her, get to know her a little better.
We went to this place in Silverlake that I can never recall the name of, but is still there, where we paid something outrageous for two cups of coffee. I think it was like eight dollars, which, believe it or not, was a lot to pay for coffee at one time. To this day, we howl with laughter when we recall the phrase on the menu: “We invite you to enjoy the purest expression of the bean.” I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, and I’m usually pretty fuzzy on what day of the week it is, I can’t recall what the “purest expression of the bean” was on that fateful morning, but I will never forget the invitation to discover it. I’m giggling right now.
Felicia started her pitch. “So I want to introduce a rival guild, and I thought you would be great to play the leader,”
“Okay, tell me when to show up.”
“…I’m not done.”
“Oh. Go on.”
“He’s a douchebag in a kilt.”
“…”
“That’s it.”
“Okay, tell me when to show up.”
The rest, as many of you know, is award-winning, online-media changing, paradigm-shifting history that I am intensely grateful and proud to be part of.
Sooner than either of us expected (well, sooner than I expected. Felicia and I have never talked about her expectations, so I’m going off of how I recall the vibe at the time), Felicia was one of a few creators who were invited by Google to pitch a channel lineup for a YouTube thing that was meant to be a sort of patronage, an effort to introduce a new generation of creators and their content to the world. I think it was a tentative effort to put YouTube up against traditional television and cable. Interestingly, I recall that they gave money to some established studios and networks (money they didn’t need) and those studios and networks didn’t do a single frame of original content. They used YouTube as a dumping ground for their libraries, attracted no audience, and were all gone in a matter of months. As grateful as I am to Google for its early patronage of not just Felicia, but other creators I love, I wonder if that money could have been more wisely invested? Maybe an indie creator who just missed the cut in favor of some legacy company would have done something cool with it.
If my memory is correct, Felicia’s channel, Geek & Sundry, was one of the only channels that Google reinvested in at the conclusion of the original funding effort. None of the legacy companies returned. I remember how great it felt to survive that. It made me feel like we were doing something right, and these old legacy companies just fundamentally didn’t get it. It felt like I was part of a new space that I’d helped create, an expansive, growing space for people like us to make the things we wanted to see, to highlight and celebrate our creative friends and the artists we loved, to reach out to an audience that we were part of, that was bored to death the the legacy stuff. It didn’t last long, but it was magical while it did. And there is some of that magic in the air again, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So you probably know that Felicia created Geek & Sundry, and if you know that, you know that we created Tabletop, together, and that we did four incredible seasons of the show, plus an RPG spinoff called Titan’s Grave, before a legacy company bought us, fucked everything up, set all the money on fire and destroyed what we built, and confirmed for all of us involved that it’s better to remain independent, no matter how great their pitch is, because legacy companies are full of people who do one thing very well, and it isn’t managing online communities, nurturing indie creators, and patiently allowing an enthusiastic audience to organically grow over time.
The sale and subsequent destruction of what we worked so hard to build (extending beyond the programming) was deeply demoralizing for me. Not owning the rights to what we created has allowed Legendary to take everything we made, stuff it in a box, and put it in the corner of a basement somewhere. When I tried to license it, or buy it back, they refused to sell. Weirdly, it was very important to someone there that I know the company considers Tabletop a dead property that they will never do anything with. So even though I could potentially do something cool with the thing I created, and pay them for the privilege of taking all of the risk, they have no intention of ever doing anything at all with it, they’re going to sit on it and never do anything with it. It is a dead parrot. They never gave a reason that makes sense, so I’m going to presume it’s either spite, or standard executive fear that something someone killed could come back and be a huge success without them.
But before all of that, for the entire time Felicia and I were making things together, it was the best thing, ever. The joyful memories, the difference we made in the world, the boardgame renaissance we helped instigate, and the hundreds of thousands of new gamers we helped create all come back into my mind all the time. I’m so proud of us, so grateful that we did it, and that we did it well. I genuinely loved doing Tabletop, and I genuinely love working with Felicia.
And because the world is on fire right now like it hasn’t ever been in my lifetime, I feel called to do what I do best: entertain you, and give you something to enjoy with people you love, while we all do what we can do get through it. When Felicia told me about Kickstarting the movie and possibly adding our original show as a stretch goal, I swear to all the gods I felt that magic in the air all over again. I could smell it, I could taste it. I could see it, shimmering at the edges of my vision. It was, like, right there, just begging me to jump back in and take a swim.
So I did, and that’s why Felicia and I are getting the band back together for a limited series that will feature us playing games, together. Let me tell you all about it!
Felicia is Kickstarting a reunion movie called The Guild: Ren Faire’d, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s been massively successful, and is maybe on its way to becoming the top earning crowdfunded movie in history. It’s incredibly exciting for all of us who know and love Felicia, and it’s especially exiting for me, because we are in stretch goal territory, which means not only do we all get The Guild movie I want to see, we are also now building up funds to produce a show where Felicia and I pick a theme, share things we love around the theme with each other, like books, music, movies, recipes, podcasts, etc., and then play a game with some friends that kind of fits the theme. We are calling the show Conludo (that’s Latin for “play together” because Felicia has a degree and I am notoriously bad at naming things)
A big part of the show’s focus is how much joy there is in curating things for each other around a theme, in discovering our new favorite things, and sharing them, on our way to a game. For example, I love a game called Rock Hard: 1977. It’s a heavily-themed resource management game where you are a hopeful rockstar in the 70s, trying to make your way through the clubs, to the radio, and, ultimately, the big stadium show. So this episode’s theme would be music or something about music. To set the mood, I’d probably bring a book I love, like Meet Me In The Bathroom, or Under The Big Black Sun. I may bring in a record, like the new Sincere Engineer release, Probable Claws, (that I’m on!) or Who Let The Dogs Out, from Lambrini Girls. Maybe I’d pitch going to a punk show together, or watching Decline of Western Civilization together, something like that. And part of what’s fun about this is that I don’t think Felicia likes punk the way I do, if at all, so I’d almost certainly be exposing her to something new, and I have no idea how she will respond. We’re still refining it, but you get the idea, right?
It’s important to me that I set expectations. I have told you what this is, now I need you to know what this is not. This isn’t Tabletop Redux, or Son of Tabletop, Abbot And Costello Play on Tabletop, Tabletop Strikes Back, or Tabletop 2: 2Table 2Top. This is its own thing, and it will be (legally distinctly) different from what we did with Tabletop. The North Star of that series was “Create More Gamers” by showcasing some of the greatest games of the moment, as well as some timeless classics, around a table of interesting people having fun together. I’m refining the language, but the North Star for Conludo is “Celebrate Sharing and Playing Games With Friends.” It’s more of a hang out, than it is a how to. It’s a celebration of gaming culture, going as far back as we want to go. We aren’t limited to new games, and I have at least one game that I love, that is out of print, that wouldn’t qualify for Tabletop, that I will bring to Conludo, because this is a fundamentally different show, and that means I can.
I’m so excited to do this. I’m so excited to revisit a space that I haven’t spent much time in for almost a decade, after living there for most of my life. I’m super excited to do it with one of my best friends and favorite creative partners.
The Kickstarter ends on August 21, with a massive livestream that I think is planned for around six hours, on Felicia’s Twitch thingy. As I am writing this, backers have pledged 4.7 million dollars (2.3 million in Itchy and Scratchy dollars) with a little over 32,000 individual backers toward the movie and Conludo. Felicia would love to get past 5.7, which would put her in first place of all time, past Veronica Mars. That’s a big ask, but I’d love to help her dream come true. Will you join me?
I’m Wil. I write this blog, I host It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, and I co-host the official companion podcast, with Felicia, for Stuart Fails to Save The Universe. Thanks for reading. If you would like to get my blog updates in your inbox, here’s the sign up thingy:
