An 87-second promo trailer for The Life & Times of Video Games, encapsulating the essence of its form, style, and content over three seasons and counting.

Have you ever wondered about the stories behind your favourite video games? Like, how they were made and why they were designed a certain way?

The Life and Times of Video Games has the answers to all of this and more, packaged in half-hour audio documentaries that take you back to the past and loop you into the present — to understand not just how games used to be, but how they shaped the medium into what it is today.

Find out more at lifeandtimes.games.

(And if you're a current listener, please share this with anyone you think might be interested in the show.)

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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.

Links

The Nostalgia Box website

The Nostalgia Box is @nostalgia_box on Twitter

And @nostalgiabox on Instagram

Jessie Yeoh interview snippet taken from this WAtoday article

There are some photos from my trip on the episode page

To support my work, so that I can uncover more untold stories from video game history, you can make a donation via paypal.me/mossrc or subscribe to my Patreon. Learn more at lifeandtimes.games/donate (I also accept commissions, if you're after something specific.)

Also remember to rate this podcast on whatever podcasting platform you prefer.

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I speak to Kelsey Lewin, a video game historian and collector, retro games store owner, and self-proclaimed Wonderswan enthusiast, about the challenges — and also the merits — of researching and archiving the artefacts connected to games development and culture, both past and present. She also shares her insights on how the growth in retro gaming helps fuel interest in games history, why some of the most interesting stories are far beyond the typical narratives of games history, what quirky things we can find when looking into the Wonderswan and its inventor, the famed Game Boy hardware designer Gunpei Yokoi, and much more.

Kelsey co-directs the Video Game History Foundation with Frank Cifaldi, where the two of them have been doing amazing work in preserving and archiving the artefacts of games development and culture — not so much the games themselves, but rather more the packaging and documentation, the source code, the marketing materials, the magazines, etc. And she also co-owns Pink Gorilla Games, a retro games store located in Seattle.

This is the fifth entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month(ish) I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to learn about the many ways people are preserving the games industry's past as well as to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now.

Interview conducted May 25th, 2020.

Links

I couldn't fit them inside the podcast summary character limit, so if you're interested you'll need to head to the episode page on my website: lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-kelsey-lewin.html

To support Kelsey and her work you can:

Donate to the Video Game History Foundation

Follow her on Twitter @kelslewin

Subscribe to her YouTube channel

Buy stuff from Pink Gorilla Games

You can support me and my work by:

Subscribing to my Patreon

Donating via PayPal

Following me (@MossRC) or the show (@LifeandTimesVG) on Twitter and Instagram (@lifeandtimesvg)

Buying my books — The Secret History of Mac Gaming is available now, albeit temporarily in digital form only (as it's now out of print), while Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet is still some ways off being finished. I'll have a book/ebook version of my audio documentaries out soon.

And telling other people to check out my stuff.

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Seth Robinson, Rob Eberhardt, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)

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Glenn Brensinger, former sysop of Software Creations, talks about how his then-boss Dan Linton's "Home of the Authors" Software Creations bulletin-board system (BBS) served as a sort of prototypical Steam.

The interview was done as part of my research for my upcoming book Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet, which is on Kickstarter until July 8th.

To get access to supporter-only soundbites, and early access to soundbites like this one, you can subscribe via Patreon — where anybody who donates $3 or more per month also gets ad-free high-bitrate downloads of every episode plus various other bonuses like research notes and full transcripts.

You can also support me by sending a donation to paypal.me/mossrc. Learn more at lifeandtimes.games/donate

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The man behind The CRPG Addict, a blog dedicated to playing through the entire history of computer role-playing games in roughly-chronological order, discusses his decade-long (and counting!) conquest and the roots of his passion.

We also explore how his approach has changed as he's learnt more about the genre's history, the merits and failings of a scoring system for comparing games, the value of talking about a tiny niche within a niche in such detail, how he learnt to stop feeling guilty about loving role-playing games, and more.

Interview conducted April 30, 2020.

A super-basic overview of the CRPG lineage/family tree, as posited by Chet:

The top level is PLATO games, the Ultima series, and Wizardry (though it also came from PLATO RPGs), plus SSI's early games

Then you have key derivatives of these: Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, and SSI's RPGs

And "at least half" of the genre going into the 1990s branches off directly from these

The period between roughly 1978-83 was the primordial stage, where there were lots and lots of weird ideas that turned out to be evolutionary dead ends

As an example of how this works, he pointed to The Witcher III, which he believes has a clear antecedent in the Aurora engine games, including Neverwinter Nights, which took influence from the Infinity Engine games, which go back to SSI's Gold Box games, which go back to the early SSI titles. It's the CRPG equivalent to six degrees of separation.

My full list of links from the episode is too long to fit into the summary field, so if you'd like to be directed to all the websites and blog entries and other things that relate to our discussion, you'll have to do so via lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/interview-crpg-addict

***

Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg.

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Eric Zocher, Seth Robinson, Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 joke, and a cult classic multiplayer game.

As you'll hear in the episode, Pimps at Sea went through many iterations and received several "development" updates. You can find the original website archived on the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20011107122402/http://www.bungie.com/products/pimps/pimpsatsea.htm and see a few highlights from the years that followed at the episode page on The Life and Times of Video Games website.

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, and Seth Robinson. If you'd like to become a supporter, for as little as $1 a month, head to my Patreon page and sign up. Or for one-off donations you can use paypal.me/mossrc.

Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg. For more episodes on humorous moments in gaming history, check out Wololo, Bug Salad, and Hogs of War.

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

And if you'd like to commission me to do some games history or consulting work for you, in whatever form, and for this show or for your own thing, don't hesitate to email me on [email protected].

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I speak to librarian, games critic, and blogger Phil Salvador about his website The Obscuritory and his research and writing on games unplayed and unknown. In a far-reaching interview, conducted in late February, 2020 (and thus before the full brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the West), we explore the challenges, rewards, and lessons we've each found in writing about little-known areas of games history, as well as the importance of being kind and much, much more.

This is the third entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month(ish) I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to learn about the many ways people are preserving the games industry's past as well as to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now. Follow the "games history explorers" tag or the Interviews category on my website to see them all. (Or just search the show feed in your podcast player for episodes that begin with "Interview:".)

Links:

Carly Kocurek (she's been researching the girl games movement, amongst other things)

Control Monger freeware shooter game on Obscuritory

Bring on the Old and Obscure at Archive.vg

Bad Game Hall of Fame

MobyGames user review of Destiny, a game that's like Civilization but terrible

Knights of the Crystallion on The Obscuritory

The Colony developer memoir; my book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, tells more of the story behind the game

Phil's article on one of Cyberflix's games, Lunicus; my book has some general info and a few insider quotes on the company's rise and fall

Phil's interview with Bob Stein of the Voyager Company

Millennium Auction article on Obscuritory

The CRPG Book

Mystery Science Theater on Wikipedia

SimHealth article on The Obscuritory

Video Game History Foundation co-director Kelsey Lewin's tweet about a pregnancy tracker for Wonderswan

Treasure Quest Wikipedia entry

Continuum (I also have a video about it and I covered it in my book)

Emily Reid's Speculation Jam

My talk on the rise and fall of Ambrosia Software

Secret Writer's Society article on The Obscuritory

Angst: A Tale in Urban Survival download

Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness article on The Obscuritory

Magfest

Mysterium

Keeping the Game Alive article/community profile on Eurogamer

GTA Secret Hunters article/community profile on Ars Technica

Tecmo Super Bowl fan and modding community

Hamster Republic RPG engine

Phil's Twitter handle is @ItsTheShadsy

My book: https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/

Life & Times of Games on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames

Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG

Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg

Podcast website: https://lifeandtimes.games

Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg.

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Eric Zocher, Seth Robinson, Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, and Vivek Mohan. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nintendo Power founding editor and former Nintendo of America marketing executive Gail Tilden remembers her beginnings at the company — before the NES, before Nintendo Power, and even before desktop publishing.

Head to https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/soundbite-gail-tilden for a full transcript of the soundbite.

This interview was conducted for an article about the launch of the Game Boy, Tetris, and Pokemon in the West — which you can find at https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/19/18295061/game-boy-history-timeline-tetris-pokemon-nintendo 

To get access to supporter-only soundbites, and early access to soundbites like this one, you can subscribe via Patreon — where anybody donating $3 or more per month also gets ad-free high-bitrate downloads of every episode plus various other bonuses. Learn more at lifeandtimes.games/donate

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How 2006 PS2 hit Bully (aka Canis Canem Edit) showed an alternate future for Rockstar and the open-world genre, with its compromised-yet-brilliant schoolyard satire — here I dive deep into the game, not for its overblown controversies but rather for its struggles against technological limitations and its triumphs in world-building, satire, and focused, more intimate and structured open-world game design. And I wonder why, nearly 15 years on, open-world games continue to strive for bigger and bigger playgrounds filled with more and more trivial collectibles rather than building on the legacy of Bully's deliberate, glorious smallness.

Thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon — especially my $10+ backers Vivek Mohan, Simon Moss, Wade Tregaskis, Eric Zocher, and Seth Robinson. If you'd like to become a supporter, for as little as $1 a month, head to my Patreon page and sign up. Or for one-off donations you can use paypal.me/mossrc.

Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg.

My book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming, is available in bookstores in the UK and Australia, as well as online from the likes of Book Depository and Amazon. See the official website for more info.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I speak to the creator of Shmuplations.com, a large repository of translated interviews with Japanese game developers, about his approach to doing the translations, his insights on the Japanese games industry, and the highs and lows (and struggles) of running a time-intensive side hustle.

This is the second entry in a new series of interviews I'm running alongside the main show — every month(ish) I'll talk to a different person who's exploring games history, in one way or another, to learn about the many ways people are preserving the games industry's past as well as to further our understanding of how this wonderful medium (and the industry that's built around it) has come to be the way it is now.

Links:

Castlevania – Developer Commentary

Kazuko Shibuya - Square Developer Interview

Mega Man - 2011 Developer Interview

Women and the Famicom – 1991 Special Interview

Women of Game Design - 1990 Developer Interview — Yuki Ikeda; Hisako Takizawa; Reiko Oshida; Yuko Tataka; Sanae Nito; Kanae Saeda; Kaori Ikeda; Meiko Wada; Capcom Sound Team

What is Game Design? Three Perspectives — Hideo Kojima; Kouichi Nakamura; Satoshi Tajiri

Super Mario Kart - 1992 Developer Interview

Rez - 2001 Developer Interview

Shmuplations Patreon

My book: https://secrethistoryofmacgaming.com/

Life & Times of Games on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lifeandtimesofvideogames

Twitter: @LifeandTimesVG

Instagram: @lifeandtimesvg

Podcast website: https://lifeandtimes.games

Please remember to tell other people about the show, and to leave a review by following the links at ratethispodcast.com/ltvg.

Thank you to all of my wonderful supporters on Patreon for making this possible, but especially to my $10+ backers Wade Tregaskis, Simon Moss, Vivek Mohan, and Seth Robinson. You can help, too — a contribution as little as $1 a month makes a big difference towards ensuring this show has a bright future ahead of it. (And as a Patron you'll get to skip those pesky cross-promotions from other shows on my network, among various other bonuses like transcripts and extra content.)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices