Susan Cummings co-founded the 2K Games label at Take-Two, where in a two-year window she signed BioShock, Borderlands, XCOM, and The Darkness, and pulled Civilization out of Atari one week after her first call with Firaxis. She is a Rockstar alum, co-founder of Tiny Rebel Games and Fictioneers, and today the co-founder and CEO of 10six Games, building the AI-forward roguelite YOU vs Zombies. In this re:Play, Greg Off traces thirty years of deal-making, platform pivots, and what "finding your rock band" really means.

In this episode:

• Intellivision, Utopia, and Don Daglow as the first game and a lifelong friend
• A Boston recruiting job, a "book of multimedia companies" in 1995, and a first cold call to Al Lowe at Sierra
• Ed Fries and a Microsoft lunch before Xbox existed — "Microsoft still has more money than you do"
• The Sam Houser meeting at her San Francisco apartment in 1997 that led to Rockstar Games
• Moving to New York a few months after GTA3 shipped — and what the "best and worst" years at Rockstar actually cost
• The eye of Sauron turning to GTA, and why every competitor's attempt to clone it failed
• The birth of the 2K Games label — the pressure to be something that wasn't only Rockstar
• Borderlands verbally pitched at E3 as "Pandora's box" and "Halo meets Diablo"
• BioShock signed on a GameSpot article and a long friendship with Ken Levine
• The 50/50 IP co-ownership structure — and why Susan and Ryan Brant were the first to write it into the contract
• The Civilization acquisition — first Friday call to Jeff Briggs, $20 million check to Atari the following week
• XCOM as a freebie thrown in at the last second — the story Atari now hates telling
• The Oblivion distribution deal — a $60 million guarantee they earned back in the first week
• The "third-game rule" — why the magic tends to arrive on the third title in a series, and why publishers keep trying to skip it
• Leaving Take-Two — the reset with her husband and creative partner Lee, and starting Tiny Rebel Games
• 10six Games — a seven-person team in Wales building YOU vs Zombies
• The design of YOU vs Zombies — human-authored art, story, systems, and level design, with generative AI as the customization layer
• The honest read on AI in games — roughly 90% of developers using it, most afraid to say so, and Steam's disclosure requirement as an unintended scarlet letter
• The renaissance argument — why the next few years at the small-team end may look more like a renaissance than a reduction

Links & References

Susan Cummings on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanicummings/

10six Games — https://www.10sixgames.com/

YOU vs Zombies on Steam — https://store.steampowered.com/app/4224660/YOU_vs_Zombies/

Tiny Rebel Games — https://www.tinyrebelgames.com/

Rockstar Games — https://www.rockstargames.com/

2K — https://www.2k.com/

In this episode of re:Play, Greg Off sits down with Michael Rubinelli — a 30-year veteran of the publisher and platform side of the games business. Across EA, THQ, Midway, Capcom U.S.A., Playdom, Disney, Kixeye, WAX, and now Tyranno Studios, Michael has been the person deciding which games get made, on which platforms, under which business models.

From a video-game rental side hustle at 24, to a mock company letterhead that got him into CES, to an EA job offer in December '91 on Tony La Russa Baseball, Michael traces the whole arc — Madden's early franchise years, a Midway VP seat alongside arcade veterans Mark Turmell, Ed Boon, John Tobias, and Eugene Jarvis, running Capcom U.S.A. through a business-model inflection, joining Playdom in early 2010, overseeing Marvel Avengers Alliance, the Disney acquisition, a Facebook-to-mobile transition at Kixeye, an Australian public-company CEO seat, WAX, and finally Tyranno Studios as CGO — where he is working with Richard Garfield on Dirty Dealing, a heads-up card battler set in 1974 Chicago.

In this episode:

• Wading into the deep end — the David Bowie quote that shaped a 30-year career philosophy
• Finding his place on Madden — the pass-interference exploit and the field-goal bug he caught before ship
• The arcade masters who taught him to earn the next coin in sixty seconds
• Marvel Avengers Alliance — and why a JRPG-shaped Marvel game worked on Facebook
• The signature framework: why platform and business-model transitions are extinction events
• Capcom, Konami, Sunsoft, Hudson Soft — who made the jump and who didn't
• Scratch: The Ultimate DJ — the game he calls his favorite that never shipped
• Playdom, the free-to-play mental unlock, and being a "cultural czar" through Disney
• Kixeye as a cautionary tale about missing a transition
• Player ownership, the "off ramp," and where Web3 gaming fell short
• Tyranno Studios, Dirty Dealing, and a lean studio around Richard Garfield's design

Recorded in-studio at Off Base's Berkeley studio on July 22, 2026, this is a candid conversation about a career built on deliberate discomfort — and one line from Michael that anchors the whole thing: "Making games I look at as a calling, not really a job."

Links & References

• Michael Rubinelli on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rubinelli-gaming/
• Tyranno Studios — https://www.tyranno.io/
• Electronic Arts — https://www.ea.com
• Midway Games — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Games
• Capcom U.S.A. — https://www.capcomusa.com/
• Playdom — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playdom
• Marvel Avengers Alliance — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel:_Avengers_Alliance
• Scratch: The Ultimate DJ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch:_The_Ultimate_DJ

In this episode of re:Play, Greg Off sits down with Charlie Rosen — the Broadway orchestrator, three-time Grammy winner, and Tony Award recipient behind what he calls "the great video game songbook." With 13 Broadway credits including the Tony-winning Some Like It Hot, five 8-Bit Big Band albums and a sixth in progress, and Grammy wins for arrangements of Kirby Super Star and Super Mario, Charlie has spent the last decade making the case, one arrangement at a time, that video game music belongs in the canon.

From a three-year-old with perfect pitch at the piano in the San Fernando Valley, to a Berklee bass scholarship, to Broadway at 17 as a pit musician on 13 the Musical, to a 2017 Kyoto vacation that ended with a shamisen lesson in Tokyo and the seed of The 8-Bit Big Band, Charlie traces the whole arc — the pit-musician years that taught him what school could not, the interior-designer theory of arranging that travels from Broadway to a 45-piece jazz session, the 2022 Grammy for "Meta Knight's Revenge" co-arranged with Jake "Button Masher" Silverman, the 2025 Grammy for "Super Mario Praise Break" with Brian Carter and Matthew Whitaker, and a working list of composers he considers foundational to the songbook — Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, David Wise, Michiru Yamane, and Koichi Sugiyama.

In this episode:

• Kyoto, a 300-year-old instrument shop, and the shamisen lesson that started a band
• Kazushi Okimasa's ensemble Famicoto — the gifted album that flipped a switch on the flight home
• The signature framework: video game music is not a genre, it's a delivery vehicle, like a Broadway musical
• The interior-designer theory of arranging — keep the character of the house, knock down a wall, refresh the palette
• The dramaturgical seed — why every arrangement should be describable as a spoken sentence
• 13 the Musical, 2008 — how a composer's unusual ask put a 17-year-old in his first Broadway pit
• Same musician on Broadway and on the 8-Bit Big Band — how one skill set covers both careers
• The 2022 Grammy for "Meta Knight's Revenge" — the third-ever Grammy moment for video game music, after Baba Yetu and the Journey score
• The 2025 Grammy for "Super Mario Praise Break" — authenticity, not parody, and why the gospel arrangement of Mario earned its place
• Who Charlie considers foundational to the video game songbook right now
• Album six preview — Dragon Quest, Hades, Chrono Trigger, and Baka Mitai from the Yakuza series
• His re:play answer — the one game he wishes he could wipe from his memory and play again for the first time

Recorded remotely between Off Base's Berkeley studio and Charlie's studio in New York, this is a conversation about a career built in parallel — two careers, actually — and one line from Charlie that anchors the whole thing: "Video game music itself is treated as a genre, but it's not really a genre. It's a delivery vehicle, as is a Broadway musical."

Links & References

Charlie Rosen — http://www.charlierosen.com/

The 8-Bit Big Band — https://www.the8bitbigband.com/

Charlie Rosen on Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Rosen_(musician)

Famicoto (Kazushi Okimasa's ensemble) — https://www.famikoto.net/