Greetings from the front lines!

Old Glory Dispatches is where we give you updates on our studio and where we write about stuff we think you’d like.

With the U.S. holiday, it was a short couple weeks, but just before Thanksgiving Elon Musk announced that xAI was “going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!" He’s also been posting on X asking how much it would cost to buy Hasbro.

Many of our colleagues in video games shudder at the thought of Elon doing either thing. As Elon is extending his powerful influence into video games, this is worth writing about.

In this dispatch:

• SOPs

  • Our Take on AI

• Status Report

  • xIP

• Old Glory Recommends

  • Blastar

You’re reading the newsletter of Old Glory Studios, an indie game studio where combat veterans make combat games. If this was forwarded to you, hit the link and

^_SOPs

Our Take on AI

The current, bleeding edge of AI technology is still “just” LLM (large language model). It’s not quite the autonomous, cybernetic organism that is the Terminator. AI is currently very good at spitting out an amalgam of pre-existing content, but it cannot think of anything new. It can’t even reason with anything most people would consider logic.

As a player, as an audience member, I hate any recycled and collated content an AI spits out as much as I hate any inauthentic and insincere product.

However, as a developer, I have nothing against AI. Leading media companies already use AI in development, often in the earliest stages of concepting. At Old Glory Studios, we don't currently use AI for writing or for any of our game art.

BUT we use AI for nearly all of our documentation. It saves us literally WEEKS of time, and none of this content is intended for players. As as we move into more marketing, we're considering using AI tools to help us quickly edit video content for social media, but for the moment, we’re only using AI tools for efficiency, not creativity.

I’m very curious to see what xAI does. I expect in 5 to 10 years, we'll all be using tools xAI or a similar company develops. These tools may disrupt the development process as much as digital film editing and digital special effects disrupted filmmaking, but people will still author these games.

I learned to edit film on a 6 reel Steenbeck. Now, I can edit videos on my phone. Tools do not replace creativity. You can run from AI, or you can make it work for you.

^{_{Status Report}}

xIP

Intellectual property (IP) can make or break a fledgling game studio. As Old Glory develops its own, we’re keeping an eye on the moves companies bigger than ours are making, and Elon Musk is at least tweeting about some major moves.

Elon Musk buying Hasbro for its IP sounds bold and outrageous, but from a man who’s just announced a new games studio, it’s logical and expected.

For decades, Hasbro has been the steward of beloved franchises, and Musk knows their cultural weight. Framing this acquisition as "anti-woke" is strong marketing; it’s a signal to older grognards who have been shelling out cash for Hasbro’s games for decades. Those players aren’t just consumers—they’re the fans who feel an ownership for these IP and who have kept them alive for all these years.

Hasbro’s corporate politics have been, at best, weird. Creating "non-binary" Transformers when robots are literally binary is not progressive; it’s performative. Now, they’ve taken swipes at the legacy of Gary Gygax, the man who created Dungeons & Dragons. Hasbro owns D&D, but instead of honoring him, they’ve alienated the older fan base by rewriting history.

The tragedy is that before Hasbro acquired Wizards of the Coast and D&D in 1999, the company was getting it right. A look back at G.I. Joe in the 1980s shows a multicultural, diverse America standing against chaos and tyranny. It was patriotic, muscular propaganda, but it resonated because it tried to make everyone feel good and it didn’t put anyone down.

Elon Musk is a disruptor. If he’s buying Hasbro, it’s because he sees their IP as undervalued and underused, which they are. Love him or hate him, the move would make sense.

^{_{Old Glory Recommends}}

(This section contains no sponsors, just stuff we like.)

Blastar

Elon Musk got his start in video games when he was 12 with Blastar. Apparently, he sold it to a magazine for $500.

It kind of sucks, but you can play a web-based version of it here.

More updates on Project Cadiz will be coming soon! Thanks for reading!

Keep an eye on your in-box for more dispatches from the front lines!

—Lewis Manalo, Executive Producer

Stay dangerous!

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