My guest today is the Scottish comedian, television presenter and writer, Susan Calman. While studying law at the University of Glasgow , she spent three months in North Carolina working with criminals on death row. After she graduated, she became a corporate lawyer, and soon started performing as a stand-up in the evenings. After seven years, she left the legal profession behind to become a full time comic, winning the Best New Scottish Comedian at the Real Radio Variety Awards in 2009. Si...
Apr 03, 2023•59 min•Ep. 11
My guest today is the Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur, Henk Rogers. While a student at the University of Hawaii, he’d while away the hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends. After he moved to Japan, he bought a computer and used it to develop a role-playing game of his own, called Black Onyx , tailored to the Japanese market. When the game’s backer pulled out of the deal, he decided to self-publish the game, and borrowed $50,000 from a friend to set up Bullet-Proof Softwar...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 10
My guest today is the American designer of some of the finest strategy video games yet made. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Computer Science in 2000, he accepted a job to become a business consultant. Before he arrived for work, however, he saw an advertisement for position at Fireaxis, the development studio founded by the legendary designer, Sid Meier, which he successfully applied to. Having worked as a programmer on Civilization III and IV , in 2012 h...
Mar 21, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 9
My guest today is the British-Malaysian stand-up comedian and comedy writer Phil Wang. Born in the UK, when he was one week old his parents moved to Malaysia, where he attended school until the age of sixteen. The family then returned to England, moving to Bath in Somerset, which my guest once described as “a spa town for people who find Cheltenham too ethnic'. While studying Engineering at King’s College Cambridge, he joined the Footlights drama club, of which he later became president. Since g...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 8
Shahid Ahmad was a schoolboy living on a London council estate when he sold his prized BMX bike to raise money for programming books and taught himself to write computer games. After several knock-backs, in 1983, at the age of seventeen, he sold a game for £300 to a commercial publisher. He soon made a name for himself in the emerging Britsoft scene, programming the Commodore 64 version of Jet Set Willy , which sold more than a million copies. Having worked on dozens of his own games, included C...
Mar 06, 2023•55 min•Ep. 7
My guest today is the reclusive designer of one of the greatest video games yet made. He studied game design in Montreal and, after a brief stint working at Ubisoft, left to begin work on a game of his own, a platformer that combined the art style of the Super Nintendo classics of his youth, with perspective-shifting innovations of his own. Six years in the making, Fez launched in 2012 to near universal acclaim, part of the first wave of so-called indie games. After featuring heavily in the ...
Feb 27, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 6
My guest today is an Emmy-nominated writer, sketch comedian, voice actor and performer. As a teenager she studied improv comedy at the famous ImprovOlympic studio in her home city of Chicago, training that prepared her for when she later starred on Whose Line Is It Anyway and the sketch comedy show Key and Peele . She has worked on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live , The Twilight Zone and, most recently, the sixth season of Rick & Morty . Throughout her career she has also written and tal...
Feb 20, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 5
My guest today is the American co-creator of one of the longest-running and most popular independent games yet made. In high school he and his older brother Zach designed adventure games based on fantasy and science fiction stories they invented together. He taught himself computer programming and received fifteen offers to enrol in PhD math programs. At Stanford University, he and his brother continued work on a procedural adventure game called Dwarf Fortress , in which players guide successive...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 4
My guest today is a stand-up comedian, television presenter and Irish national treasure. He studied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at University College, Dublin, where during a debate, he cracked a joke, made the audience laugh, and forever doomed himself to chasing that high. Since then, he has toured the world as a comic, as well as becoming a prolific television host: he has chaired Mock the Week , Have I Got New For You , Blockbusters , Robot Wars , Stargazing Live , and the video game-...
Feb 07, 2023•59 min•Ep. 3
[Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of addiction to prescription pain medication and fatal overdose.] My guest today is an American writer and performer who stars in Apple TV’s Mythic Quest series, and who has, in recent years, voiced some of video gaming’s best-loved characters. She grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and rose to prominence via the web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’ , in which she starred alongside her brother, Anthony. Since then she has become a prolific voice actor ...
Jan 31, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 2
My guest today is a software engineer who, in 2021, released a word game that soon became a global obsession. He grew up in a Welsh farming village, attended the Royal Holloway University, then moved to North America to study for a Masters. In 2011, after graduating, he joined the staff of the website Reddit, where he began to design experimental games such as The Button , Place and, in his spare time, a game called Wordle . Several years later he returned to the Wordle prototype, which he finis...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 1
Welcome to My Perfect Console with author, New Yorker journalist and The Observer's video game critic, Simon Parkin. Each week a guest picks the five video games they would like to immortalise on their very own fictional games console. Trailer episode featuring clips from forthcoming episodes with Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, and Charles Cecil MBE, co-founder of Revolution Software, creator of the Broken Sword video game series. Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of...
Jan 16, 2023•10 min
