Episode 6 - Zachary Rozga (Twin Galaxies)
Zachary Rozga is a Senior Executive at Twin Galaxies, a legendary name in gaming history that built its legacy by recognizing high scores and world records. Today, the organization is evolving into a modern competitive platform where individual achievements across all games can be celebrated, powered by a no-code system that enables creators, developers, and brands to launch their own custom challenges.
In this episode, Zachary shares his journey from international development to the gaming industry, highlighting the importance of fair play and the powerful role of community in shaping meaningful brand experiences.
We also explore the current state of the industry, including rising development costs, the shift in esports culture, and why now is the moment to create systems that build community, empower audiences, and redefine connection through competitive play.
Connect with Zack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharyrozga
For more information on Twin Galaxies, visit their website at: https://www.twingalaxies.com or on social media: Facebook, Twitch, Twitter.
Episode Transcript
Daniel Lipson (00:02)
Better Games, Better Gamers is a show where we talk about how games shape and are shaped by the communities and the people around them. For this episode, I'm joined by Zachary Rozga of Twin Galaxies. He was recently featured as a guest speaker at GamesBeat LA, and I've invited him here to hear more about his story. So love to get a quick intro to Twin Galaxies and your work.
Zachary Rozga (00:24)
Thanks, Daniel. appreciate you inviting me onto the show. I also very much appreciate you attending our session at games beat. that was a little bit of our coming out party. as you saw on stage, I was joined by the man, the myth, the legend himself, Mr. Jace Hall. and we were there basically to announce to the gaming community that Twin Galaxies is relaunching, I guess is the best way to put it, we're here and open for business. So for your listeners out there who are over the age of let's say 45, you may know of Twin Galaxies from the Guinness Book of World Records for video games.
Originally founded in the early 80s and was legendary in the arcade days. But as the video game play moved from the arcade to the console and then to the PC and then to the mobile device, how it was originally formed and how adjudication took place, it was not ready to scale with the scale of the video game industry. And so I mentioned Jace Hall because he acquired Twin Galaxies in mid 2010s and embarked on a mission of reimagining and modernizing what made Twin Galaxies great, which was you knew that there was a Twin Galaxies record. It was true, accurate, and the person actually achieved it.
But in order to be able to encompass all video games, because that's the goal. The goal is not to have one genre, one title. It's any video game that you or your community can set a record in, whether that's a speed run, a fastest kills, most kills, et cetera, highest score, you name it. We want to be able to accommodate you in that game.
And in order to do that, we had to move everything to the cloud. And we had to build a unique system that replicates that judge, that person standing behind you, making sure you're not slipping something into, you know, the USB slot or, ⁓ you know, actually not even competing, you know, for the world record. And so that.
I would say came to a point where it was ready for prime time in 23, 24, which is when I joined. And I came over from my company that I was running that was in the eSports and gaming space and basically helping brands that you wouldn't necessarily suspect get into eSports and gaming. And so I fell in love with the idea that all games are equal because what I found while working in the e-sports space is there were like four game titles that dominated. I personally played none of them. My kids played none of them. My friends played none of them. And so it really felt like this subculture that didn't actually represent gaming.
And yet the notion of competition and competitiveness is relevant to every game because it's a game. Like that's why you play games is to compete and win. Whether you're competing against yourself or you're competing against your buddies, your family members, there's an element of competition. So that's why I fell in love with it. And also, from the commercial side of it, brands, were constantly asking me to align with more family-friendly games that just weren't found in live streaming. And certainly we're not, minus Rocket League, we're not a quote unquote e-sport. I feel like it's important because even when I was at Gamesbeat, there were lots of conversations of like, wait, the Twin Galaxies?
You mean like the record keeper? I thought that was a community resource. I thought that was like, you know, ⁓ a not for profit. And the answer is, yeah, I mean, up until this point, I wouldn't say it was profit seeking. I would say it was more of like a community driven service for the community, but a confluence of things have happened that I believe make us extremely important now for the video game industry to get through this current moment and prepare for the future. And in particular, my own read on the situation is that what we're doing is even more relevant for like AA games, independent games, than, you know, the big titles.
Daniel Lipson (05:33)
I want to jump back in history a little bit. What does gaming look like and did gaming look like to you when you were growing up?
Zachary Rozga (05:42)
So I think I was five when the NES was released. And basically all the way through college, I had the latest Nintendo entertainment system that was, on the market. one of the constants for me throughout all of those games was Mario which makes me very happy with this latest release. My favorite game of all time that I have probably played thousands of hours is Tecmo Bowl
That game, just, mean, hours and hours and hours. And then, past that, Prince of Persia's, like, not the original ones, but the more narrative-driven cinematic ones that came out a little bit later. And then I probably finished all the way up through the first seven or eight of Final Fantasy.
As I got a little bit older, I played more sports games. So I got really into FIFA. I got really into the 2K golf game. During COVID, I played that a lot. But then interestingly, as I have kids, It shifted a bit, when I got an Xbox and the game that like my first daughter loved playing and actually I played, she watched was all the Lego games. So Lego Star Wars, Lego Hogwarts, the Lego movie, we played those together. Now I don't find myself playing that much.
Zachary Rozga (07:07)
I still have a few games on my mobile device that are kind of go-tos. Actually, I have played the old school FreeCell every single day it was one of the first game apps I ever got on the first iPhone How long has that iPhone been around? I had like the first version of it. So I don't remember, what was that? 2008, 2009, something like that. So I downloaded one of the first like gaming apps it was just FreeCell.
Daniel Lipson (07:37)
I think what's interesting about looking at your background is you have this obvious passion and obvious connection to games, and you've had it. But that wasn't your background. So I'm curious what that path looks like from experiential marketing into getting back into games.
Zachary Rozga (07:52)
I never planned on games being my career. Never planned on being in the business of games. Actually never planned on being in the business of marketing I actually have a master's degree in sustainable development, was in international development and not building hotels and high rises, but in, working with people and working with, entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Like, actually, my background's in competitiveness and small business enterprise development in emerging economies. And I spent my better part of the first decade working in that. And I was focused on alternative livelihoods in rural economies, which basically meant tourism.
I actually grew up at a ski resort. So, like, that kind of made sense, I loved it, loved it dearly. I had the most wild twenties I could possibly imagine. And not in a partying super hard and I mean, yeah, we had fun and we partied, like in a four year period, I worked in 50 different countries and really getting to experience crazy stuff like sleeping overnight with the Barbig people in central Tanzania, where the women still wear goatskin clothing, et cetera. And so it was stuff like that, traveling the outer islands of Vanuatu. So that was really cool and crazy. then you get older and I also recognized that that life would have basically required me to live on an airplane and I kind of got tired of it. And so came back to the States and was really good at the idea of selling experience and how that kind of translated into the U.S. economy was really around experiential marketing. And so that's how I got into experiential marketing. And then really what I saw there was a problem with attribution. So if you run an event, and you have a booth, what does that actually mean to the bottom line? And so I created an app that was meant to be appended to your booth through experiential marketing. And we were doing really well until February, March of 2020. And your listeners may or may not remember what happened in February of 2020. And I was... living in the Wu-An of the United States, which was Seattle. mean, epicenter one is literally like a stone's throw away from where I live. And my company got shut down with external forces that were beyond my control. And when the opportunity presented itself to try to help virtualize conferences, which is kind of what we decided to do during COVID. I ended up picking up a client called eSports Insider, They were one of the reference publications for the eSports industry. And what was fascinating is everything I thought I knew about eSports as somebody completely from the outside, like no experience, didn't watch live streams. Everything I thought to be true about the way the business model worked turned out to be not. And so I thought they had media rights. I thought they were just like the NFL or the NHL or MLB, know, pick your traditional sport of choice. And it just wasn't the case. And so then I became fast friends with a guy at Misfits gaming group.
And essentially, he was like, have you ever thought about applying your attribution concepts to live streaming and helping me and my team sell more inventory? And I was like, I ain't got nothing else to do. Let's do it. And that's what pulled me into e-sports and gaming. And also at the time, there was a lot of money sloshing around
That's what brought me into e-sports and gaming. And it was kind of fun because most of my gaming was personal. I didn't game with friends. It was just something I did for myself. it's a far cry from where I was in my career, but I kind of enjoyed it. And then, you know, things started happening again, outside of my control in the industry. but it all led to me getting introduced to Jace. And then him kind of telling me that there was this platform he'd been working on that literally allowed any game of any kind, anywhere to be turned into an individual competition.
And so I said, let's go, I'm in. And it was like that hard of a decision. And so now we're here today and we have this robust platform. We've had a handful of really high impact clients and excited to really start scaling what we're doing to people who need it.
Daniel Lipson (12:46)
So you gave a brief introduction at beginning. I'd love to dig in a little bit more about really how Twin Galaxies is different from some of the other platforms and how other people are doing business, especially with influencers and things like that these days, and what are some of the advantages.
Zachary Rozga (13:07)
the core essence of Twin Galaxies is that it's a no-code solution. There's no need to write any code whatsoever to turn on or spin up a competition against a video game. And I think that's really important because every other... solution that we've seen that's out there, whether it's in advertising or whether it's in gaming, is an SDK, is a tech tax against your core stack. it requires work on the person who adopts it, right? Ours is meant to run alongside or over the top of what you're currently doing.
And the way that we do that and still get to the truth is that everything that comes in as a submission is a individual video evidence of what you're trying to achieve. So, you know, for instance, we ran a competition early on with Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince of Persia against the original Prince of Persia on the PC. And it was who could finish level one the fastest. And so the people who played it set up such that they could record it. Some of them did it through like an OBS setup. There was one guy who played it and he just set up his camera over his shoulder. we don't really care how the video is created as long as there's an ability to see what is required in the video. And so what's fascinating though, is that that was what was set up as the mechanism, because that's what Twin Galaxies had been doing previously. once it moved out of the arcade and into the home with consoles, you had to set up a video camera and essentially let the VHS roll. And then you had to send those boxes of tapes to a judge to make sure that it was true and accurate. And then that judge would send it to another judge to double verify, cetera. So what we've done now is actually made it so that all of that is done via the cloud. We have a really sophisticated video ingestion and display system built into it.
And we've gamified the way that voters vote so that anybody now can be a judge and their vote can count Anybody in the world can be a part of the judging. And going back to the interesting byproduct is by displaying those videos effectively in a social platform is that the person who made the submission, the person who is a part of the competition is now getting people watching them play and getting that recognition. And I think that's something that goes back to what we talked about earlier, the core of video games is video games are competitive and people want to be recognized. And so, know, ⁓ we already have in-game leaderboards and like...
So why would I ever want to use an out of game leaderboard? Okay, so is there a video associated with that leaderboard? No. Does anybody get to see what that person did to reach that score? No. Can you tell that the person who's at the top of the leaderboard cheated? No. And so effectively, they're leaderboards for you versus the game, not you versus your peers. And I think that's the major distinction that we make
Sure, you can climb all the leaderboards you want. And I think mobile is kind of even worse than this. If I play a mobile game and I'm getting close to the top of the leaderboard, right before the timer runs out, 10 people jump on top of me and I got to go figure out how to climb it again. Right? And so, were those real submissions? Were those real people?
Nobody knows. And this makes it so that you, as the player, have to actually decide that you want to be seen, and you know that people are going to watch your video and verify that you did what you said you were gonna do. So it definitely just cleans out the level playing field. And what's super fascinating from that perspective, having run back to back, counter-strike speedrun tournaments in aim targeted maps is that we had exponentially less cheating in the second one than we did in the first one.
We removed 75 people from the first competition for cheating. I don't think we removed more than 20 from the second.
And I think it's because it's effectively the same player base that people are like, man, what's point of cheating when I know I'm just gonna get removed? I might as well just actually compete. What's interesting about this and why it is applicable to any game is that these aren't the full game.
These are measurable micro moments in a game that are set up to demonstrate ability. And it also means a lot of games could have thousands of these things stood up against. for instance, just think of Pac-Man, right? When people think of like highest score ever in Pac-Man, what about fastest to complete the first page? What about how far can you go without getting hit by a ghost? I could keep going, but like that's the idea, right?
And somebody might be really good. And this is also even within the aim trainer that we did with Logitech. In the first one, we had it so that there was very limited movement. It was just one path. And that created a set of winners. And then we ran another one that had different paths to go and like you could go up and down and it created a different set of winners. And we had a lot of the same people play both competitions.
Daniel Lipson (19:15)
with the ability to have so many different games, how do you approach different audiences and different customers, who you're trying to work with?
Zachary Rozga (19:24)
Honestly, the best way to figure out how to set up a challenge is ask your community. They know what they want to compete against, they know what are the micro moments in the game that would make a fun and compelling contest. So we did that in the very first one that we ever ran, which was with Mortal Kombat. we didn't go broadband, we went pretty narrow cast on getting that feedback, is that there is a game mode in MK1 called the Survivor Tower that literally has no measurement against it.
And so let's figure out who can actually climb to the very top of the survivor tower on extremely hard mode. So play on extremely hard mode and who can get to the top of the survivor tower. what we didn't expect is that a lot of people were able to do it and beat it. And even the people that I was working with at the publisher didn't realize that that many people could get to the very top and beat it. Because essentially, you have to go through 25 opponents to get to the top and you never get to refill your energy. So you have to not take hits. I couldn't even play one level on Extremely Hard, let alone 25 in a row. And so thankfully we thought about, well, what's the tiebreaker?
And the tiebreaker was, if everybody gets to the top, who is the fastest? And so, that's an example of taking an existing game, has leaderboards, has an esport and coming up with a new element that is community focused and community driven. And what it ends up doing is it creates these micro communities that care about that. And they're super passionate about it during that time.
And guess what? They want recognition. So the other thing we've just started doing now is actually working with some celebrity gaming YouTubers because they have the exact same dynamic, which is they've built this following of community and fans and audience.
And challenges and competitions are kind of part and parcel of that. And they've been doing it for a long time, but what they haven't been able to do up until this moment right now with us is actually get their fans to participate and actually see what their fans are able to do. Because prior to this, most challenges are like mega influencer versus mega influencer who can do it best. Right. And it's more of like setting up beef for content than it is actually figuring out who's the best and then once you actually do Involve your audience and ask them to submit to you Well, how are you gonna figure out like all those things that I talked about earlier the cheating the video ingestion. we just ran one with Carl Jobst, who is a large YouTuber who focuses on investigative journalism in the annals of video game achievements and records. He ran the first one and it completed last week and it was a Doom, original Doom competition. already his community is asking for more and more and more and giving him ideas of games and challenges that they would like to see. if you're a video game publisher and you have a community, you have to keep that community happy. You have to engage that community. And I'm offering, I've got a really good low-lift way, a no-code way for you to engage your community. And guess what? You can ask them what they want. And more often than not, we can actually serve it up to them.
Daniel Lipson (23:12)
when you have something that is so community driven and especially as there's a lot of these other user generated content platforms, that I know a lot of marketers and brands are going after them. one of the things that is really interesting is also how the community is dealing with things like Fair Play and healthy competition. curious how you've seen that with the platform and how yours kind of differentiated, from some of the other platforms.
Zachary Rozga (23:40)
there are a couple of other competition platforms out there that are running what would seemingly look like similar competitions to us. I've talked to their head of their leadership. They don't care if people cheat. Because they're running it purely as a marketing expression. So the more people that play, the more eyeballs that are on it, the more eyeballs that are on it. They do not care if cheating takes place, if it's rampant, the winner cheats, because also they're not trying to give away like epic prizes either. their grand prize is like a $50 gift card or something. So, in that instance, if somebody comes out and claims cheating, are they going to get sued? Probably not for 50 bucks. Twitch is actually a perfect sidecar If you're going to compete in one of our competitions, why not do it for eyeballs? Hey, I found out that Carl Jobst is doing a Doom level one speed run, I'm going for it today. I got to beat 50 seconds right now. Can I do it? That makes for compelling content, right? Like it's a great live stream. The whole Roblox, Fortnite brands diving in there. I think our platform is the best friend of any one of those campaigns, definitely on Fortnite because I can tell you this in my past life before I started working with Twin Galaxies. And this is one of the things that drove me to working with Twin Galaxies. I was involved in a couple of Fortnite custom maps with mega Fortune 500 brands. If people finished the map, that was a massive win and never did people come back a second time.
Whereas what we had with our Counter-Strike competition was people grinding for 50 plus hours on a 45 second run. So just imagine how many times those people played that. And guess what? Logitech's logo showed up in every single one of those. Logitech also had their logo show up in every one of the videos that were watched that were uploaded to the platform a minimum of 20 times. And so that's not happening if all you're doing is building your little land or associating yourself with a Roblox mini game. People at best are playing it to get the one-time gift card if they finish it. They're not coming back and guess what? They ain't sharing it with anybody.
And so to me, it's the difference between if you're at Coachella, it's the difference between putting your signboard up on the road between Los Angeles and Palm Springs or hosting the VIP tent at the event. Because you just throw up a Roblox install at best people, like if they see it, they're flying by. If you host a competition with us. People are getting in and they're staying and they ain't leaving. And the people who aren't in are gawking at it, looking at it and pointing at it and taking pictures of it and sharing it. So it's only a matter of time before smart brands start to realize And, I know that they have their own competitions inside, but again,
Most of those competitions aren't trying to create a level playing field. They're certainly not creating moments that can be shared externally. and we're not expensive, for the cost of building a Fortnite map and then spending all the money on mega influencers to get it seen and drive traffic, we... might be 5 % total budget to append a competition to it. But I would say that 5 % of the budget that you spend will return 1000X in terms of participation, brand lift, and emotion. And going back to what we were talking about is actually community engagement and community sentiment. There's no community built around a brand creating a Fortnite Map.
Daniel Lipson (27:57)
And I think that gets me to the heart of the show actually is really kind of looking at community and the value there. this is actually ironically the first time I've asked this question, but what does being a better gamer mean to you? and how has that changed and evolved?
Zachary Rozga (28:17)
So I wanna go back to community and it's pretty clear that a lot of the younger generation, a lot of their community is an eternally online community. They spend more time communicating with one another through a device than they do face to face, and one of the mediums that they share their experiences and their emotions with and their shared passions is through gaming. And so one of the things to me about better gaming is actually the reduction of toxicity. I have a freshman in high school. Maybe it's because I work where I work. She's very much online, but she doesn't like social media. All of her communication with her friends takes place in private forums. I think that's gonna become more normal than less normal. So, know, private discord communities, right? Not public Instagram posts.
Yes, there's going to be a subset of people that are doing that, but those are the people that are actually like fame seeking, right? It's not the primary medium for communication. And part of the reason is those platforms have just become so toxic it's hard to avoid the toxicity. And so one of the things that we're really trying to do is to create community through competition, or to empower community through competition, but we believe that, and we've seen this is that competition actually reduces toxicity because when you get together to watch your Fortnite tower climb, I'm not talking about Daniel. I'm talking about the the submission. the performance. I'm just judging the performance. And so most of the commentary, even if you cheated, isn't like you're a damn cheater. It's like, you know what, saw this in timestamp two minutes and 20 seconds. There's no way that that happened without a video splice. And so, there's no like, well, that guy's a dirty [cheater] now, that might be happening in elsewhere, right? But that's not happening in our platform because that's not the point of our platform. The point of our platform is to get to the truth. And so what we've seen is actually the only time that we really get like non-performance oriented commentary, it's usually like a game recognizing game.
Like, man, how did you do that? I see you use that combination of players. That's why it was faster. Cause I thought there was no way anybody could ever get through this quicker than I did. But that player's finishing move is fractions of a second faster. Multiply that times 25, you know, finishing moves. And we now have 17 seconds,
Gaming, even in a first person shooter world, is supposed to be a pastime. I know for some people it is a profession and that's where it gets a little bit weird. But, my goal for better gaming is just less toxicity. I would like personally less toxicity in my entire life. I think that's something that I'm striving for is to figure out how to... reduce anxiety, reduce, anger and otherism. And if you remove the individual from something and you think about it just from the performance, I feel like that does help with that sort of feeling.
Daniel Lipson (31:23)
Twin Galaxies again has this long legacy. And I'm curious how you see competitive gaming and really e-sports, changed over the past 15, 20 plus years and also kind of where you see it going in the future.
Zachary Rozga (31:36)
eSports is a misnomer, from my perspective. Because all e-sports are team-based activities. They're all team-based competitions. And that's like basically saying that the power five are the only sports that exist in the world. The only thing that exists is football, football or football, basketball, soccer, and then I guess if you're talking about secondary, you've got volleyball and et cetera, right? That's just, that's not the case. Like most sporting,
And most competition, whether it's, and particularly in the amateur side is individual sports. You look at the Olympics, how many of the sports that are being competed against are individual sports versus team-based sports? And it's almost like the team-based sports have been added just because of, dollar numbers, which is fine. But we, when we think of sports and sporting, in the traditional sense, it's an all encompassing term and it represents everything. Esports doesn't do that. Esports is really just team-based activities. It's arena style sports and arguably more people compete in traditional sports and independent sports. And I'd probably posit that more people play individual video games than they do team-based games.
And if we have anything to do with it and any say in it, esports either comes to be known competitive gaming or competitive gaming as we know it overrides or overtakes esports. if we win, that's what's happened, right? and that people who are amazing at Trackmania have just as much recognition as somebody who's amazing at Counter-Strike. if not more, because they individually got the gold medal, whereas the team from Counter-Strike got the gold medal. So, there's a lot of things that are gonna have to happen for that to come to like bear fruit, but like, if you wanna really recognize what our BHAG is, that is it. And what I'm looking for are, people who are... not necessarily the player base, I think the players will come. I'm looking for people who are on the game publisher side who want their game to be featured. They want their game to be seen in that pantheon. And so that's my challenge, do you want to be a part of this next evolution of competitive gaming or do you want to sit on the sidelines?
Daniel Lipson (34:07)
one of the things I really wanted to ask you a little bit about was who've been some of your inspirations and mentors and pushed you towards what you're doing
Zachary Rozga (34:17)
The guy who was like most instrumental in me being who I am as a professional was my first boss slash business partner when I was working overseas. that's where also I got the startup bug and probably the reason I haven't worked at a company.
Since then is because this is gentleman named Len Kordner. He passed late last year, unfortunately, and I lost touch with him. And he lives in Australia. I never had the opportunity to say goodbye or anything like that. But he's probably the most impactful and instrumental person on my business career. He was my absolute mentor.
You know, he was actually a legend in Australian business and I never knew that. And that's part of what was so awesome because the way I met him was through, some different circumstances. But it's since then, when I've met some people who are my age or maybe like five to 10 years younger, he's put up in the Hall of fame of Australian businessmen.
And I worked directly for him for like, five, six years, like I was his number two. And I never had this indication because I never worked with him in Australia. So I never knew. I worked with him overseas. I'd see him in Vietnam. He come visit me in South Africa. We go to Brazil together. And so when you're in those environments where you're both just the two foreigners. It's just, you have to like lean on each other, right? I still sometimes just like think back to some of the crazy stuff that we got ourselves involved in. And he was, and he always was, he was the one that was like teaching me and training me on what it means to be a good leader. And also a lot of the things that I believe in, like this idea of reducing toxicity, creating fair play, a hundred percent comes from him. Like a hundred percent.
He left the corporate world to go into international development because he sick to death of the corporate world and didn't see that it was actually adding value back to humans. It was by and large extracting value. And so that's also one of the things throughout my entire career, whether it was in marketing, whether it was an experiential, whether it was in that early stages was about as a business, what can I do to create value for my customers versus extracting tribute from.
And then recently I've had the opportunity to have a mentor who's a man named Larry Goodman, who is a legend in his own right in the advertising and marketing space. And he is an advisor to me. He's a friend. Like I said, he's my mentor. And he also has had a legendary career where he was basically Ted Turner's right-hand man at the early days of TBS until I think they exited to AOL. And so I've been lucky that I've been surrounded by these people, but never, and for whatever reason, they've always been like solid peers and friends and never did I like think to myself, I'm so lucky to be in this person's presence.
And maybe it's just because of the way that we were connected and they saw something in me, I don't know. But yeah, those are the two gentlemen. I guess in the gaming space, really the strongest mentor I have is my partner, Jace He's a legend. mean, dude has like, I don't know, 100 video game AAA titles to his credit. I've known this for a while, but it was only yesterday that he sent me the list of all the games that he has credits on. And I was like, good God, dude. Like, okay. So grace to be in your presence. It's just funny because, you don't recognize some of these things until somebody asks, at least in my position. So and what brought Jace and I together actually was not necessarily the business. It was the actual shared values around fair play, around recognition, around doing what's right. Maybe that's what the common thread is throughout these individuals. There's a sense of shared responsibility and that we're not building a business that is purely extractive. We're building a business that is additive
Daniel Lipson (38:42)
you have this kind of international background too. What's your view on how gaming connects with internationalism?
Zachary Rozga (38:50)
Yeah. mean, look, what's fascinating is it's really easy for me. some people have, would have a really hard time stepping into the shoes that I do because they don't have that frame of experience. I've been working with people from other countries and other cultures for 20 plus years. And gaming is global.
And so I don't even think about it. one of the things that's interesting and challenging is one of the reasons that I stopped doing international development is because I was so tired of having a 24 hour clock. What I mean by that is, is like, got business partners in Europe, I got business partners in Australia, I got business partners in Brazil.
And so when I was younger, I was constantly always trying to attend to those people on their timeline. And I think one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is that, like, I attend to people on my time sure there's going to be the 945 Discord chat that is urgent you need to take care of. But if it's not urgent, then you move it to another time when it's more convenient. I think the world has also changed in 20 years and it's a lot easier to be able to be working with people in Stockholm while simultaneously working with people in Melbourne. I don't even think about it and it's just simple for me to walk into it because I've been doing it for so long.
Daniel Lipson (40:09)
So we've talked a lot about, we were talking about other countries. do you have future trips planned? What are some of your outside of the US? Do you have any coming up?
Zachary Rozga (40:20)
I do, I am presently planning a backpacking trip with my 15 year old to one of two different routes that we're thinking of doing in Canada, in BC. So that's the current planned trip, because I live in Canada Junior in Seattle. And so we go up there all the time. Prior to whatever is going on right now with our current, uh, international relations, I used to love going to Canada two to three times a year, cause it was just to get out of the States, like get a States break. having lived overseas and been an expat for many years, it's like every once in a while, it's just like, gotta get out of here. There's things that I love about it, but also, I was an expat for a reason.
Daniel Lipson (41:05)
Are there any places outside of North America that you're... maybe places you really want to go back to that you miss?
Zachary Rozga (41:14)
Definitely, like I absolutely want to take my kids back to Africa. My kids have never been like my kids haven't been to any of the crazy places that I've been. We've only taken them to like Europe and Mexico, Costa Rica. and now that my oldest is in high school, I think she's got the bug. Like she wants to go to Japan really bad, which is actually I've never been to Japan. So Japan is definitely high on my list.
And one of the places that I had planned three times, twice for work and they got canceled in once for pleasure that I really want to go to Peru. I want to go to the Sacred Valley. I've been to every major temple complex in the world, except for an Incan temple complex. I actually got engaged at Siem Reap in Cambodia. Spent a lot of time in Central America at the Mayan ruins, been to Egypt a couple of times, but I've never been able to get down into like the Incan Empire, and so that's it's on my list.
So the craziest place I've ever been, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, the craziest place I've ever been is Vanuatu. So it's an island nation in the Pacific, it's lots of islands, they've been separated for so long, like each island has its own thing. So you know the place where the people do the traditional bungee? where they're just on vines and they drop and then it swings. So that's Vanuatu, right? But the craziest thing we did is there's the, and maybe it's not now, but at the time it was the world's most active volcano. And you literally could drive up to the summit and then you had like maybe like a 300 meter walk to get to the cauldron. And you just stand there and you watch constant eruptions happening, just consistent constant eruptions. And then we finished the night by staying in a tree house underneath, like go back down to the bottom of the volcano. And there was tree houses that were there and they and we stayed overnight there just listening to the volcano erupt all night.
Daniel Lipson (43:20)
Sounds like something out of a game or a novel.
Zachary Rozga (43:23)
like that's the thing is like, think part of the reason I, I always fancied myself as like a, this is probably the part of the reason I did it. And was good doing it when I was young, I kind of fancied myself as like a Indiana Jones type. And so I was always looking for like the most like crazy adventure. But yeah, I could actually turn my a lot of my travels into a video game. It would be pretty fun.
Daniel Lipson (43:49)
it's been so long since I've seen all of them, what's your Indiana Jones movie?
Zachary Rozga (43:52)
Not Crystal Skulls. That one was terrible. Thank you Shia LaBeouf. Probably actually my favorite is that Quest for the Holy Grail.
Daniel Lipson (44:02)
Hmm.
Zachary Rozga (44:05)
Yeah, I really like that one.
Daniel Lipson (44:05)
It's hard to beat. Awesome. Well, we are about at time. where can people learn more about you and Twin Galaxies?
Zachary Rozga (44:15)
Yeah, I mean, the best place to reach me is on LinkedIn. That's where we post most of information about what we're working on currently. We're still putting together what I would say is the commercial aspect of Twin Galaxies, but the best place to see current challenges that are happening is in twingalaxies.com and then go to the challenges tab at the top. Because every challenge that's run, whether it's on a custom branded microsite, which is one of the things that we do, or it's built within directly the platform, they're all listed there. If anyone wants to learn more, they can just send me an email. And like I said, we're ready to serve and support and we're really looking for people who are just looking to provide something fun and awesome and already like a good relationship with their community. and it doesn't matter if your community is 50 people or 50 million people, our platform can serve that,
Daniel Lipson (45:15)
Thank you so much for coming on today and for sharing your journey.