Mike Drucker has already had such an amazing career. As well as being an award-winning stand-up comedian and working on shows that are firm household names across the world, he's also written for Nintendo and worked with legendary figures in the gaming world like Masahiro Sakurai, the developer behind Super Smash Bros. and Kid Icarus Uprising (which you'll hear a lot about below).
Mike joined me on the Retro Dodo Podcast to talk about his new book 'Good Game, No Rematch' as well as delving into a lifelong love of Retro Games, from sitting close to the screen to fool the Duck Hunt Dog to working with the biggest video game company in the world after the most carefree job interview in the world.
The following interview is made up of extracts from Episode 087 of the Retro Dodo Podcast, so be sure to listen to the full episode to get the complete story on Mike swallowing air to get full as a child, his favourite retro games, a bodged attempt to keep the girl next door from moving house, and much more.
Getting to Know Mike Drucker
Retro Dodo: Thank you for joining us, Mike, it's great to have you on the podcast with me! So for our readers who may not be aware of the world of Mr. Drucker, would you like to just give us a brief introduction into who you are and what you do?
Mike: Sure! I am a stand-up comedian and writer. I have written for television and video games. I used to work at the Nintendo Treehouse. I worked on Kid Icarus Uprising, which a lot of people love, and Mario Party 9, which a lot of people are aware of. I also worked for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon and a few other television shows. yeah, and on April 1st I'm releasing a book called Good Game, No Rematch, which is a comedy book about video games and how I've basically humiliated myself throughout my life with them.
Retro Dodo: I didn't realise that you were releasing it on April 1st. Is this a whole joke that somebody set up just so you could wind me up for an hour about a book that's not actually coming out on April Fool's Day? Because if it is, I need to know now because I've done some serious research into this!
Mike: That's how I felt when they told me the date! They were like, 'We're gonna do April 1st.' And I was like, 'Is that, are we...are you sure? Because I feel like...' And they're like, 'Yeah, it's like the new quarter. It's when we're gonna release it.' And I was like, 'All right, folks, I believe you.'
Good Game, No Rematch
Retro Dodo: So let's, let's kick off by talking about the book, 'Good Game, No Rematch.' I've read it and it's fantastic; I loved it. I've just said to you before our interview that it has shades of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett in there. For me, the writing style, the little footnotes at the bottom where you get that extra little bit of insight into your world, it's all brilliant. But as you said, it's very much about your life with video games, how you have consistently, correct me if I'm wrong, but how you seem to have consistently been bad at them for a lot of your life.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. That's definitely an element of it. Love 'em, terrible at 'em!
Retro Dodo: So, tell me about how got into the mindset of writing the book.
Mike: I've obviously always loved video games and I've had a fun career with writing both in video games and out, and so when the Writers Guild of America strike happened in 2023, I had time off because I couldn't work and I was kind of thinking like 'What can I do at this time? What's something that I've wanted to talk about or do?' And you know at the time you can't during the strike... you can't sell a script. You can't take meetings. You can't you're allowed to write something but I really wanted to do something because I didn't know how long the strike would last.
Mike: So I talked to my TV agent who referred me to a book agent, which I was lucky enough to have that situation. And I basically was like, 'Hey, I really want to write this. I think I'm the only person that will pitch this right now. But I want to write a funny book about video games and stories because there's a ton of great books about video games, but there's not a ton that are super funny.' You have good history books, like things like Bitmap Books who have released the best coffee table books in the world. But there aren't like a lot of personal ones, you know; there are a ton about movies or music where people write about how music changed their life or movies changed their life or even TV changed their life. And so I wanted to write about how video games could change your life. So I pitched it and, luckily, HarperCollins bought it.
Mike: I sort of started going through a list of literally talking to a few people, writing down like a list of things I wanted to talk about and you know, games from my childhood that meant a lot to me games really throughout my whole life as you get to later in the book. I kind of...after the pitch was bought, I just started writing. One or two chapters fell away, some got added in, but it was just sort of a process of like slowly kind of trying to remember everything I ever experienced with games and make them funny, which is the hard part.
Retro Dodo: It's a page-turner; you want to get to the next section to find out why something's happened, and for me as a reader, there's the perfect amount of silliness, seriousness, sadness, and happiness. Like it is, it is a funny book with lots of self-deprecating humour, especially when you're talking about duck hunt and swearing at 'that laughing dog' because everybody has that feeling. Everybody hates that dog just like they hate the Zubats in Rock Tunnel in Pokémon. They hate them and they are there to be hated.
Mike: I really wanted to write something personal because I do feel like there's too much that's super serious about games or, you know, people treat them like they're completely frivolous. Especially, I think if you were born in the 80s onwards, they're just a part of your entire life growing up. They're as important as movies, they're as important as music. They're as important as TV, even though I write for TV, you know. And so I really wanted to express how important it is to my life and not just as a hobby or not something I do outside of my life, but actually a part of my life.
I left Saturday Night Live to go to Nintendo, which is all you need to put on my tombstone.
Mike Drucker
A Nintendo-Themed Wedding
Retro Dodo: Let's talk about this Mario wedding because... well I'll leave you to put some context to this because it's an incredible story
Mike: So, what you should know is this marriage did not last very long - let me just preface it with that. So yeah, when I got married, it was actually a very beautiful wedding. I didn't want it to be a full Mario theme, but I was like, I'd like some Nintendo elements just to sort of speak. But you know, just known to me and to my friends. And so we compromised on it where we had two cakes; we had a normal cake, and then we had like a Mario-themed cake. And a lot of the table treats were Mario-themed. We made little chocolate superstars and little chocolate mushrooms and you know, put those on the table, so there were little side things.
Mike: We also set up stations around the reception hall with different consoles; a Super Nintendo, a Nintendo 64, and a GameCube, and that way there were like Mario Kart and Street Fighter to play on, there were all sorts of games and stuff. Honestly, it was just to make it more fun, but it turned out that was great for the kids at the wedding. I'd never seen children have more fun at a wedding than when they had something to do that wasn't the electric slide.
Mike: Then the entry music, I forget what it's called, to the wedding - clearly, this marriage went great! The entry music to the wedding was not Mario-themed, but like the exit music to the wedding was the underwater theme from Super Mario. So it was like, I would say it was Super Mario-themed in a way that tried to be respectful to the fact that it was a wedding that other people were taking seriously.
From Cheating At Duck Hunt To Writing Jokes For Saturday Night Live
Retro Dodo: Your CV is incredible, Mike. You've been a TV writer, you've been a games writer, an award-winning stand-up comedian. Has retro gaming played any part in your stand-up set? Has it played any part in the things you've written for Saturday Night Live or The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon? Have you taken inspiration from any of your gaming mishaps, and have your worlds crossed over before at all?
Mike: It's definitely influenced it, especially when I was at the Tonight Show. Jimmy is actually a big fan of video games and that show is super friendly with Nintendo. And so when Nintendo would come on to demonstrate something, I would often become the go-between because, and we'll get to it, but because I worked for Nintendo, I was like, I understand what you're telling me that you need and working for him, I understood what he's asking. Whereas before, when they'd talk to each other, sometimes it would be a little confused.
Mike: For example when we were showing Super Mario Wonder, he wanted to play the multiplayer mode against somebody but he was just saying, 'I want to play multiplayer' and they were saying, 'Okay You just need one console' and I was like, 'No, okay. We need a LAN connection. We need two switches. We need to have two projections.' So it definitely did that but even writing jokes like, you know, I pitched Nintendo-themed jokes even when I was working on full frontal with Samantha Bee. Samantha Bee's not a big gamer, but I was still like, 'No, we're gonna do this joke.' I was actually mad that when the pandemic started, it was someone else who pitched a Tom Nook joke that made the show. I was like, 'No, that should have been me! That should have been me on top of that. I fell behind!' Still, Alison Zeidman who pitched is a great writer!
Writing For Nintendo
Mike: My favorite part of writing is getting into the mechanics of the words and figuring out the best order for everything and the way to make the punchline hit the best and where I italicize a word, and I think they wanted that sort of 'jokingness'. So I left Saturday Night Live because I kind of knew that I was freelancing jokes and I was getting jokes on the air, but I was not a staff writer. So I was kind of hitting a wall and I was a little frustrated just being an assistant researcher, so... I went to Nintendo. Which is a crazy thing to say. I left Saturday Night Live to go to Nintendo, which is all you need to put on my tombstone.
Retro Dodo: Well, it is mad considering that the first line of your Nintendo employee chapter is, "I didn't take my job interview with Nintendo seriously."
Mike: I didn't think they were gonna hire me. I literally applied on the advice of a friend who was already there. They said, 'You need to apply for this, I'll put in a good word.' And I was like, 'Okay, but Nintendo's never gonna hire me. Who am I?' And so I did the application seriously, because I, you know, it wasn't like I was gonna prank them. But I was like, 'You know what? I'll send in the application to tell my friend I did.' And when I got an interview, I was like, 'Well, they're still not gonna hire me.'
Mike: Yeah, so during the interview I kind of like was somewhat casual about it because I really assumed that I wasn't going to get the job, and I wasn't rude in any way. I was completely polite. I was thrilled to be talking to Nate Bildorf from Nintendo of America. Like I was like, 'You did the English writing in Paper Mario, man!' But at the same time, I think because I was kind of chill about it, they were like, 'Ok, he seems like a normal human being,' because I didn't freak out. In the conversation itself, I was like, 'That's so cool. This job sounds so cool, man.' Although I actually remember saying to them 'I hope you find the right person for this job' at the end of the call!
Kid Icarus Uprising
Retro Dodo: Let's talk about your involvement with Kid Icarus Uprising and your role within the game, as well as any stories you might have of playing it.
Mike: Sure I mean, what was awesome about Kid Icarus was it was being developed as we were like helping to localize it. So it wasn't like this finished product where we played through it and then we, you know, worked on a script. It was sort of cool to see it evolving as we were going. And you know, what Mr. Sakurai really wanted with it was it to be funny. And he's even said this in interviews, you know, he needed to give not just the English language team, but, you know, the Spanish team, the French team, leeway to make the jokes in their languages make sense. And, you know, the thing is like, I know a lot of fans have different feelings on localization and there are good and there are bad localizations, of course. But one of the things that's important in it is that you want to get the spirit of what emotion they're trying to evoke.
Mike: I mean, even between Brits and Americans, sometimes I don't know what a rough-and-tumble British accent sounds like. I've had British friends who've been like, 'Yeah, you know, and you can tell that I'm, you know, from a bad area.' And I'm like, 'I don't know. You all sound fancy to me.'
Mike: Part of localization is making phrases make sense. And since there are so many jokes, a lot of comedy is... when I say culturally specific, I don't mean like different cultures find different things funny completely, but the way you phrase things is different. The way you tell a joke is different. Idioms are different. You know, one example that I've tried to use in the past is the phrase in English 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' It's probably insane if you just directly translate it word for word into another language. You know, it probably sounds bonkers, and the same goes for idioms in other languages. What Mr. Sakurai really wanted was for every person to experience the same feeling in these moments, the same reactions, and the same laughs. So he gave a lot of leeway.
Mike: The other thing I think some people forget is a lot of people who don't come from English-speaking countries take it in high school or learn it from movies. And so a lot of the Japanese team spoke English pretty fluently. It's just, again, like if you're not born into certain idioms, sometimes you don't know them. So it was a super collaborative process, but mostly it was really just like trying to get the same laughs in the same moments using sometimes entirely new jokes and sometimes reconstructing what Mr. Sakurai wrote.
Thanks to Mike Drucker for joining me on the Retro Dodo Podcast for one of the funniest interviews we've ever had. Don't forget to listen back to the full episode using the player below or wherever you get your podcasts!
