If you could NO Clip. What would YO Clip be?

Without getting into the weeds about this studio existing or that person is dead which game would you want to get a deep dive into it? For me it would be La Noire. I feel like this game was a tell-tale-game before tell-tale-games. It also was a VR game before VR. As much as i want to know more about this game it's not because it's good. There so much potential with this game. There was so much that could have been. What we have I just can't recommend. I am glad i finally played it though.

hmm maybe EA's Majestic? Normal game development already sounds like a crazy ride where you sort of hope that all pieces come together in the end, but what happens when a large part of that game is supposed to play out in the real world through phonecalls, emails, faxes and websites in the year 2001? How much concurrent players would they have been able to support? What were the influences? Did the game actually turn out okay and was it just a lack of players that made it a failure or was the game itself bad? I wasn't aware of this game at all back in the day, but looking back it's sort of a fascinating thing.

Orly's Draw-A-Story, one of my favorite games as a child.

Majestic is a great call out, would be great to learn more about that game's development.

My first thought was Final Fantasy XV just because there must be an absurd amount of stories to cover over the 10~ years of development. An actual honest accounting of the twists and turns taken during development would be fascinating.

Probably RE4. Not only is it one of the greatest video games ever made, it also had an absurdly troubled development history in which the game was basically reinvented several times--it would be fascinating to dive into all that and discover more about it. Now would be a great time to do it, too, since the fan-made HD version will be released in February (eight years in the making), and a full-on remake has been rumored for a while now.

I don't have the numbers on hand nadI knew Majestic experienced a relatively rapid demise, but my dad played the hell out of this game and I think what really did it it in for a lot of not-my-dad players was the invasive aspects of a virtual RPG. I remember for sure my dad getting complaints from friends that he'd recommended this game to them only for them to get a barrage of beeper pings on their lunch break or whatever.

Oh i also want to know more about Plumbers Don't Wear Ties. What the hell was that thing? What's up with the rallycars? Why is the footage held together by a powerpoint presentation? Who are these people? What's up with this weird comedy / erotica / reporter blend? United Pixtures?

While we're at it, i also want to know more about those FMV lasergun games that Vinny likes to play.

Blizzard North's Diablos: 1 (and maybe what they thought of Hellfire), 2/LoD, and their version of 3 before they left and it was trashed

Respawn and Titanfall 2: it is still the best single-player campaign in any shooter to date and the multiplayer is fantastic. I still play both, regularly.

Westwood's Command and Conquer games. They were kind of the trendsetting for FMV stuff, so I'd be interested in hearing about the production of that stuff and how they could continually convince a bunch of fairly well-known actors to slum it up in really hammy cutscenes.

@therealturk: Oh yeah, this would be amazing. Aside from RTS being my favorite genre for many years, my exposure to FMV was mostly through these games and I loved it.

I wanted to say "A basic history of Net Yaroze games", but i'm guessing they were mostly made in Japan so it might be hard to put together even a basic video about it.

So i will say Gunman Chronicles, how does a Half Life mod get picked up by Sierra and put on shelves? Does Valve own it now? Why aren't they selling it on Steam? And i'm REALLY curious to know where the developers went afterwards (ok after a quick search Gunman Chronicles might be the most interesting thing any of them did, but they might have fun stories to tell about it).

I want the Konami/Kojima struggle during Metal Gear Solid V's development. All of it from the dumb false game studio to the 'Hey, have this game ready by September. Because that's when we're shipping.'

Shame the major players will never talk.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023469/Classic-Game-Postmortem

Looks like there's been C&C post-mortem talks from GDC as well:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025777/Classic-Game-Postmortem-Command-Conquer

Yager/Spec Ops: The line. Walt Williams (the lead writer) has given plenty of interviews about his role in the game and its story, but no AAA game has come out since with even close to the ideas of Spec Ops. It spent 5 years in development and there must have been tensions and somesuch behind the scenes which I don't think we hear much of as the team is German and the studio folded without making another big budget title (they were working on Dead Island 2, and I think developed a free to play game called Dreadnought which swiftly disappeared). I think the story behind its creation would be fascinating and really hope something more comes out.

I'd like something on the first MDK. It's an incredibly bizarre game, with very different versions on PC and PS1, music from Tommy Talerico, and an absolutely bonkers music video ending (in the PC version). The main character is a Mortal Kombat-style digitized actor, the art direction is unlike anything I've seen elsewhere (strangely, it has the look of what a look of current indie "PS1-style" games look like now), Earthworm Jim shows up as a collectible, and a lot of gameplay revolves around an (at the time) extremely cool sniper mode. The whole thing feels like it was made in the wild west of "anything goes" game development, and I'd love to know more about everything that went into making such a unique, innovative package.

I would love to have some in-depth interviews with the Disco Elysium team. It has been one of the most fascinating game narratives I've encountered, and I'd love to know more about the motivations and inspirations behind it, outside of the blurbs here and there about it being from alive RPG they created to play back in the day. I'd also love to get their original notes and sourcebooks for the setting.

@tartyron: I don't find myself reading books anymore but there are 100s of game development books i would read from cover to cover. NDAs should be changed to. None of your secrets are safe. We will be writing a book 20 years after every game is released. More of a Will Disclose Agreement. Total missed opportunity. I think that's why i'm totally into youtube courtcases these days. Nothing better than a trial where people are telling about affairs to save themselves from 30 years in jail to get 10. Anybody know any without commercials? (not paying for youtube). OJ Trial, and David Grunwald. ASMR.

Deathrow, from the OG xbox. violent frisbee and late stage capitalist nightmares.

@tonyblue87: I also thought about MDK when I saw this thread. Potentially also MDK 2, just because of Bioware developing it (though they had only really done Baldur's Gate before it, so it wasn't during their RPG heydays).

Brood War

I'd love to know what they think about single handily kickstarting an entire medium

Though extremely unlikely that anyone else would be interested: The Senran Kagura series.

For me it's the cancelled project BC. As a kid I remember reading previews in magazines and really wanting it. As a Peter Molyneux game I can have a fair guess as to why it didn't work out...but I'd still love a deep dive on it.