My guest today is an English video game designer and programmer. In 1984 he designed The Entrepreneur , a simulation game about running a start-up company. When it sold just two copies, however, my guest left the world of video games and began exporting cans of baked beans to the Middle East. When the computer manufacturer Commodore mistook this venture for a software company with a similar name, my guest signed a deal to design a database system for the Amiga . This benign deception eventually ...
Sep 04, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 37
My guest today is a game designer and Founding Chair of New York University’s Game Center . An influential writer, speaker, and thinker on video games he has taught generations of emerging young designers. The New York Times once described him as the “reigning genius of the mysteries of games.” My guest’s experience is not merely academic, however: in 2005 he co-founded area/code , the studio which subsequently released one of the best regarded puzzle games yet made: Drop7 . Most recently, he jo...
Aug 28, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 36
My guest today is Digital Curator for Contemporary Collections at The British Library . After graduating from Aberystwyth University with a degree in Library Studies and Art History, my guest was awarded an MA in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester . Then, having worked as curator of maps at the National Library of Scotland , my guest joined the British library, and began to devise creative reuses of digital collections, including via video games. This work has led to collaboratio...
Aug 21, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 35
My guest today is a game director who has pioneered new forms of nonlinear storytelling that blend film and games. After twelve-year stint at the British development studio Climax, where he directed Silent Hill: Shattered Memories , he began work on an independent project, Her Story . In the game, partly inspired by Sharon Stone’s audition tapes for the film Basic Instinct , you sift through a trove of police interview footage to uncover a mystery. Her Story’s style of disconnected, live a...
Aug 14, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 34
My guest today is editor-in-chief of Time Out London . After graduating from SOAS University with a degree in religion and the history of art, he moved to China for a few years, then struck out as a freelance writer contributing to, among other publications, The Times , the Observer , Heat magazine and the New Statesman . In 2012 he assumed the role of features editor at the men’s magazine FHM , of which he later became deputy editor. From there, he edited the pioneering newsletter Mr Hyde , and...
Aug 07, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 33
My guest today is multi-award-winning stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. Born in Edgware London, to a Punjabi Sikh family, he was in his mid-twenties when he first tried stand-up. Five years later he became the first British act to perform at the Caribbean Comedy Festival in Trinidad. Since then he has been a guest panellist on 8 out of 10 Cats , performed twice at Live at the Apollo , and is one of the most memorable contestants on the hit show Taskmaster , having appeared in season 3. In 20...
Jul 31, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 32
My guest today is an American food critic and voice actor. Born in Chicago in the late seventies, he began performing in public as a young child after he joined the chorus for a production of the opera Carmen , appearing alongside the tenor Plácido Domingo. He began voicing commercials at the age of seven, before moving to California hoping to take on character roles. There he joked with a friend that his ideal role would be to voice the pirate Guybrush Threepwood in the Monkey Island series of ...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 31
My guest today is a writer and narrative designer for independent and blockbuster video games. Born in London she studied English Literature at Kingston University, then completed her postgrad in journalism. She worked as a freelance writer, contributing to the Guardian and the BBC , often covering in games and the lack of representation of people of colour within the industry. In 2014 she took a course titled ‘Writing For Games’, which resulted in ‘ Before I Forget ’, an affecting indie game in...
Jul 17, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 30
My guest today is an English programmer, game-maker and President of the Kyoto-based video game studio Q-Games . Born in London, he dropped out of school at the age of 17 to join Argonaut Games where, among other titles, he worked on the Game Boy space combat title, X . The project so impressed Nintendo , that the company invited my guest to Japan, where he contributed to StarFox , a now legendary Super Nintendo dogfighting game featuring an anthropomorphic fox. After a stint working for Sony in...
Jul 10, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 29
My guest today is an English comedian, actor and one of the most prolific joke writers in the UK. He first made a room laugh as a young child at his aunt’s wedding, when, during the ceremonial speeches, the other guests overheard him speaking to his mother. While a student at the University of Sheffield he again became an accidental stand-up when, at the last minute, he filled in for the compere at a comedy event. Since then he has delighted audiences with his rapid fire joke-telling, both at th...
Jul 03, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 28
My guest today is a French Moroccan political journalist and author based in London. She grew up in Nantes on the west coast of France, then moved to the UK in 2009 to study journalism at the University of Westminster. After graduating, she freelanced for several broadsheets, then joined the Evening Standard as a political diarist. In 2016 she became the media and politics correspondent for BuzzFeed New s where she broke stories including the UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s meeting with Wikileaks fou...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 27
My guest today is a writer, producer and director of plays, films and videogames. In 1997 he left Belgium to study theatre at NYU in New York. While a student my guest began freelancing as a video game journalist contributing to Next Gen , Official Dreamcast Magazine and Famitsu in Japan. He then joined Treyarch to work on the video game adaptation of Steven Spielberg's MINORITY REPORT , a project that set him on the path of cross-media storytelling. His 2014 graphic novel RICKY ROUSE HAS A GUN ...
Jun 19, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 26
My guest today is creative director and writer of some of the most memorable and influential independent games of recent years, including Bastion , Pyre , Transistor and, most recently, the smash hit Hades , which topped many of 2021’s best games of the year lists. In the nineties he co-founded Arcadia , a website dedicated to films and video games, which led to an internship at Gamespot , one of the largest websites specialising in video game coverage in the world, of which he eventually became...
Jun 12, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 25
My guest today is an award-winning author, journalist and writer for film, television, and video games. After graduating from Michigan State University with a degree in English literature, he travelled to Uzbekistan as a volunteer for the Peace Corps. He then returned to New York where he worked as author and editor, reporting on the Iraq war for Harper's Magazine and contributing literary criticism to The New York Times Book Review . A keen thinker on video games, in 2010 he published Extra Liv...
Jun 05, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 24
My guest today is Sooz Kempner, an English actress, pianist, singer and award-winning stand-up comedian. Born into a showbiz dynasty – the family dog appeared in an advertisment for Nissan, and their cat, Boris, played Jonesy in Aliens – she moved to Ayia Napa to work as a Christina Aguilera tribute act. After she returned to England she began a post-graduate course at Royal College of Music , performing stand-up in her spare time. In 2010 she graduated from the RCM and promptly won Best Newcome...
May 29, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 23
My guest today is Kelsey Lewin, co-director of the Video Game History Foundation , the non-profit dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. In 2017, after graduating college, my guest helped curate an Atari-themed pop-up exhibition at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Two years later Game Informer enlisted her as a volunteer to digitize the magazine’s entire archive at its Minnesota headquarters. After five weeks of intense work, she became the Video Game Histo...
May 22, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 22
My guest today is Danny Pudi, an American comedian and actor, who played the role of Abed Nadir in the long-running American sitcom Community . Born in Chicago, Illinois to a Polish mother and an Indian father, he studied communication and theatre at Marquette University in Milwaukee having won the inaugural Chris Farley Scholarship – an award that led him to perform improv comedy alongside Dave Chappelle. In 2005 he moved to Los Angeles, and starred in several sitcom pilots before joining the c...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 21
My guest today is Tetsuya Mizucguchi, the Japanese designer of some of the most transcendent music-themed video games yet made. He graduated with a degree in media aesthetics from Nihon University, then, inspired by a photograph of a virtual reality headset made by NASA, joined Sega hoping to work on a similar project. A keen sports car enthusiast, he developed the arcade racing game Sega Rally Championship then, during a research trip in Switzerland, attended a dance music concert and found him...
May 08, 2023•59 min•Ep. 20
My guest today is Iain Cook, a Scottish musician, producer, and pop star. In 2003, while studying at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, he met Martin Doherty, who asked my guest to produce a record for his band. The two remained friends, and later played together in the post rock group Aereogramme . In 2007, after Aereogramme disbanded, my guest bought himself an analogue synthaser. Four years later he and Doherty joined up with the music journalist and singer Lauren Mayberry to form the...
May 01, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 19
My guest today is Ellie Gibson, an award--winning journalist, presenter, and one half of the comedy double act Scummy Mummies . Born in South London, my guest joined Sony in 2001 and there wrote the manuals for first-party PlayStation games. She moved into journalism, covering games for a variety of publications, including Eurogamer, The Guardian, Metro, and Vice . In 2013 she met aspiring comic Helen Thorn and together the pair decided to form a double-act to celebrate the scummier side of pare...
Apr 28, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 18
My guest today is the Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist Ronan Farrow. Born in New York City he earned his degree in philosophy at just fifteen. While a teenager he served as a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth, advocating for children and women caught up in the Darfur crisis in Sudan. In 2009, at 22 years old, he became a special advisor to the Obama administration, then a Rhodes Scholar, earning his PhD in political science at Magdalen College, Oxford. It was his work detaili...
Apr 24, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 17
My guest today is Dan Vecchitto, the American creator of one of 2022’s funniest games. In Trombone Champ , you play as a trombonist and must blast your way through a setlist of classical pieces, national anthems, and traditional songs in a brilliant and riotously silly reinterpretation of Guitar Hero . After a journalist for PC Gamer posted a video of himself ruining Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the game last year, Trombone Champ became a viral sensation, propelling my guest and his wife collab...
Apr 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 16
My guest today is the legendary British video game designer, Charles Cecil. While a student at Manchester University, a friend invited him to write a text adventure which led him to work for the video game publishers US Gold and, later, Activision. In 1990 he co-founded Revolution Software in the North of England. After releasing Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky , he began work on Broken Sword , a world-spanning adventure game starring the American patent lawyer, George Stobbart and...
Apr 17, 2023•57 min•Ep. 15
My guest today is Grace Curtis, a video game critic and one of the most exciting new voices in science fiction writing. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, she graduated from the UEA with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing in 2019. Since then, she has worked as a freelance critic, contributing to Edge magazine and Eurogamer , and with the game publisher Future Friends , part of the team that helped bring you indie hits such as Vampire Survivors, Cloud Gardens and Heaven’s Vault . In 202...
Apr 13, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 14
My guest today is Erik Wolpaw, the American writer for some of the funniest video games yet made. In the nineties he and a friend founded the website Old Man Murray , a satirical online publication that poked fun at video gaming’s sacred cows, and established a tone still prevalent across the internet today. The site was read by Gabe Newell, creator of Half-Life , who later hired both writers. At Valve my guest collaborated on a new game in which a vindictive artificial intelligence chastises pl...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 13
My guest today is the English fantasy author and champion of the video game industry, Sir Ian Livingstone. In 1975, while in his mid-twenties, he founded a boardgame company, Games Workshop , which soon caught the attention of the American creators of a new tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons . My guest brokered a deal to sell D&D in the UK as a mail order company, and in 1977 opened the company’s first retail shop in South London. In 1982 he published the first of the Fighting Fantasy books, wh...
Apr 06, 2023•53 min•Ep. 12
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
