Episode List
Video Game Documentaries
Podcasts about video games — like most podcasts, I suppose — tend to go down the easy route: two or more people talk crap and make wisecracks about new games or old games (or both) and various things vaguely-connected to games. Some get into the tougher logistics of interviews or pre-planned conversations, sure, and that's great, but to go the really hard route of authored, scripted, edited stories to inspire and inform as effectively as possible? That's rare.So rare, even, that I seem to be the only one currently making a games-centric show of this sort (The Life & Times of Video Games), and amazingly — given the massive size and scope of the games industry — there are scant few games-centric episodes of ANY documentary-style podcasts.I've done my best to find them all, and to group them into the four categories below: 1) Games Culture; 2) Game Development, Past and Present; 3) Games History and Preservation; and 4) everything that I wasn't sure how to best fit into one of the other categories.
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Curated by
mossrcCreated April 27, 2020
Updated October 02, 2023
9 Likes
5 Followers
Games Culture
- To different generations, John Madden has been a different kind of icon: coach, broadcaster and, since the late 1980s, video game mogul. This is the story of how Madden linked up with an upstart company called Electronic Arts to build an electr
- In 2005, the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft was taken over by a virus called Corrupted Blood, and the virtual pandemic in this fantasy world played out remarkably like COVID-19. I talk with epidemiologist and gamer Eric Lofgren, NYU
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- Robert Ashley wonders why he spends his free time playing videogames, asks random people on the street about it, talks to a researcher whose work attempts to harness the brain power wasted on gaming, gets to know an eccentric, forward-thinking
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- Robert Ashley talks to former Electronic Gaming Monthly writers and editors about their experiences at the long running magazine.
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- The sound designers from Age of Empires I and II, brothers Chris and Stephen Rippy, tell the story behind the iconic "wololo" priest chant — for converting enemy units to your side — that's since become a popular meme, as I delve into
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- Sergey Galyonkin was just trying to fix a problem at work when we accidentally revolutionized the way we understand video game sales. We uncover the fascinating story behind Steam Spy, the people who use it, and the insights it gives us. Lear
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- It began as an impromptu April Fools' Day gag, but Pimps at Sea was the joke that kept on giving. This is the story of how a chance encounter on the streets of Chicago led to a semi-annual tradition, an industry/fan-favourite insider j
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- Robert Ashley visits a cosplay enthusiast, talks to the founder of an art show about videogames, discovers the strange world of fan fiction radio plays, and profiles a self-taught computer chip designer racecar driver/roller derby bruiser.
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- EVE Online is a massive multi-player online role playing game, which means it's a game where there are no rules -- just a galaxy where you build space ships, form alliances and go to war. The Icelandic company CCP that created the game even att
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- I go inside Australia's only permanent video game console museum and find that what makes it special is more than just the size of its collection — or the fact that it exists.LinksThe Nostalgia Box website The Nostalgia Box is @nostalgia_box on
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- At the dawn of emulation and the World Wide Web, a group of fans discovered the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games that never made it over from Japan. One of them decided to hack into a few of these and translate them, unofficially, wit
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- How a marketing guy at shareware game publisher Ambrosia Software ended up eating bugs in front of hundreds of people at Macworld New York 2000.If you have an old PowerPC Mac or the Sheepshaver emulator, you can get Escape from Jason Whong via
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- Robert Ashley helps people in videogames instead of helping people in real life, meets a comedy group who spend hundreds of hours every year playing the most boring videogame ever created, talks to a guy who quit playing games for a year, and p
- Robert Ashley edits listener-submitted game ideas into one big, crazy game, talks to the guy who owns the rights to Tetris about his plans to save the world, gets a lecture on the future of games from a New York University professor, and meets
Game Development, Past and Present
- In 1990, in a bid to move ahead of their rivals, Access Software reinvented virtual golf. Their game Links set the template for golf games over the next decade, with a technological tour de force, and along the way it dominated bestselling PC g
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- How a quest to put sound in a couple of games in the mid-1980s led to a revolution in computer game audio design and production.***These are, in a sense, the sounds of a revolution in video game history, the sounds of a change so profo
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- Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spi
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- Illustrator Mark Ferrari's artwork was so good it forced Lucasfilm Games to develop new graphics programming techniques so they could fit it on a floppy disk, and force the rest of the industry to come along with them. This is the story of Mark
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- The Xbox startup sound is an audio logo that’s become synonymous with the game console. But its origins are rooted in solving a logistical problem; how to entertain gamers while they wait for their machines to finish booting up. Featuring Sound
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- Primitive, yet iconic, 8-bit audio defined a generation through video game sounds and music. Discover the history and innovation behind those audio marvels that still fascinate today. Featuring Microsoft Sound Designer, Zachary Quarles, and Dav
- Far from a mere "Worms in 3D", Hogs of War was its own breed of madness. Hear the story of how it evolved from a concept of "Command and Conquer with pigs", what made it such a well-designed satire, and how this underrated PlayStation
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- How Nintendo and its mascot created a genre, and a combat-racing franchise heavyweight, and in the process gave us a masterclass in game balance, with the best-selling 1992 Super Nintendo game Super Mario Kart.All music and sound effec
- Sega Rally Championship changed everything for the racing genre, and the 1995 off-road arcade hit was an incredible game too. This is the story of its development, critical reception, and long-term legacy.If you're keen to grab one of
- On the late Mike Singleton and the importance of Midwinter and The Lords of Midnight, his two great works. After switching from high school English teaching to professional game development in the 1980s, Mike quickly rose to the top of
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- The story of how a terrible description of the Donkey Kong arcade game led to the creation of Lode Runner, one of the greatest games of all time and one of the earliest games with a built-in level editor.Lode Runner Legacy is available
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- A story from the dawn of 3D sports games, and the forgotten link between the 16-bit isometric and 32-bit 3D EA Sports games — this is how FIFA 3DO transformed the way sport was represented in video games.Music Credits:Lee Rosevere - And So Then
- The story of the one of the earliest flight simulator games, Airfight, a favourite among the PLATO community back in 1973, based on an interview with its creator. Airfight was a multiplayer flight combat sim with wireframe graphics and real-tim
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- Video games are a growing industry and every play-controlled experience is defined by its harmony of music, sound effects, and voice acting. In this episode, we reveal how these elements of a video game's soundscape are crafted and come togethe
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- Every aspect of the original Core Design Tomb Raider series (and by extension the franchise's success post-Core) comes back to the grid that lies beneath it — the majority of the puzzles; the platforming; the cavernous chambers and rui
- Continuing the story from Part 1, this is how the original Tomb Raider's grid-based engine/level editor impacted on the series, on Lara Croft's rise to fame, and on the shifting sands of blockbuster game development. This episode also
- Robert Ashley talks to a developer at a big game studio about his strange trip from blue collar work to video game work, gets a lesson in work ethic from legendary game designer John Romero, finds out what can happen when you give your work awa
- How brothers Rand and Robyn Miller built worlds from a manhole. This is the story of the beginning of Cyan, the company that went on to develop Myst — the all-time top-selling adventure game and one of the most influential videogames ever made.
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- It’s strange to think of a time before jumping was a standard video game action, to be expected whenever and wherever you have control over an individual character. A time before you could hop onto enemies’ heads and not die, or swing
- Frustrated by the unjustified furore that surrounded his tame interactive movie game, designer Rob Fulop turned to Santa for help. And with a clever business model he and his team at PF Magic invented a new kind of game, one in which y
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Games History and Preservation
- Robert Ashley explores the world of collectors and archivists, visiting a massive underground collection of videogames, a vintage pinball museum, and a program at Stanford University that hopes to save the history of online gaming.
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- On the rise and fall of the Premier Manager series of soccer management games — a former PC gaming juggernaut that lost its way amidst a shuffle of developers and publishers — and the part it played in the broader consolidation/homogen
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- A few months before the end of the world, everyone was saying their goodbyes. The world that was ending was The Sims Online, an online version of The Sims. Even though The Sims was one of the most popular computer … Continue reading →
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- Epic Games changed the world of gaming with its smash hit, Fortnite. But for founder Tim Sweeney, Fortnite was a culmination of everything he had learned since he received his first computer at age 11.Podcast production by Jess Miller and Asha
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- In the early days of the iPhone App Store, game developers found themselves locked in a race to a $0.99 price point that none of them wanted to become standard. This is the story of how that happened, and how it affected mobile games going forw
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- Tim Lapetino's book "The Art of Atari" is full of eye candy for anyone who grew up playing those games -- especially if you gazed at the game boxes, with illustrations that barely resembled the blips on screen. But the book also tells the story
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- On the 90s girl games movement, and its assault on the status quo of the video game market, featuring Girl Games Inc founder and former filmmaker Laura Groppe.Support comes from my Patreon and PayPal backers, with special credit going
- Before something like the Xbox could ever hope to exist, Microsoft first needed to learn how to be a successful games publisher on the PC. This is the story — or part of it — of how Microsoft got games, featuring input from four key Mi
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- In war, no information is complete. No intelligence absolute. No view of the enemy unobstructed. There’s no such thing as perfect knowledge. It is a realm of uncertainty, where decisions are made on flawed and often outdated data — as
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Stuff That Doesn't Fit Neatly into the Above Sections
- It all started with a Macintosh ad: 'You too can be a knowledge worker.' This is the story of Brian Thomas' 15-year odyssey at the helm of one of the strangest pieces of multimedia software ever created — If Monks Had Macs.You can learn more
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- We talk to Bullfrog and Lionhead legends Gary Carr and Mark Webley about the design of PC cult classic Theme Hospital, and how their careers twisted and turned to see them return to create a spiritual successor. Learn more about Two Point Hospi
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- In celebration of the release of a Mac version of the award-winning app Earth Primer — a science book for playful people — I thought it'd be nice to dig out the segment I did with its creator, Chaim Gingold, back in episode 1, and clean it up f
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