ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 123. Carlos Bordeu is the C in ACE Team, the studio behind Rock of Ages, Zeno Clash, The Deadly Tower of Monsters, SolSeraph, Abyss Odyssey, and most recently, The Eternal Cylinder. The studio’s projects are reliably-original-unto-earnestly-bizarre, going full-tilt at strange, wondrous ideas and preoccupations. They’re fascinating when they fail in places (Carlos’ … Continue reading "Behind the Cylinder, with Carlos Bordeu"...
Nov 30, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 122. Masao Kobayashi co-founded the indie studio Cut to Bits after about 15 years at Ubisoft, where he worked in a wide range of roles that often redounded to some form of project management and/or being a liaison between North American and Japanese teams and companies. That, and community management about as … Continue reading "What Else Game Devs Do, with Masao Kobayashi"...
Nov 16, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 121. The Mechanical World of Dr. Gearbox is first and foremost an attempt to rethink educational games, and specifically to rethink them into something that kids would actually want and choose to play. This is of course far from the first time that a game developer has attempted that lofty, elusive goal—so … Continue reading "A Changing World and How to Change It, with Mike Grieci"...
Nov 02, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 120. At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad, a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. “Wait, what?” you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely … Continue reading "(Chef)Squad Goals, with David Galindo"...
Oct 21, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 119. Aaron San Filippo is currently working on Whisker Squadron, a roguelike-alike riff on the arcadey corridor space-shooter genre (of which there are fewer examples than you might expect, given how large Star Fox looms). Before that, his studio Fippfly put out the similarly low-poly purist flight game Race the Sun, the … Continue reading "An Approachable Roguelike Full of Cats, with Aaron San Filippo"...
Oct 05, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 118. Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behind SkateBIRD. (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical … Continue reading "Trying Your Best and Helping Somehow, with Megan Fox"...
Sep 21, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 117. Laia Bee is one of the three co-founders of Pincer Games, who’ve debuted with the card-based brawler Fighters of Fate. She’s also deeply involved in the project of fostering a sense of community in the Uruguayan game development scene, and among South American game developers more broadly, and even more broadly … Continue reading "Pop Culture Belongs to Everyone, with Laia Bee"...
Sep 07, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 116. Don Bellenger stops by to talk about his upcoming “open-world gardenvania,” The Beauty Cult, as well as his cyberpunk roguelike-shooter-platformer (and nihilistic synthwave multi-media project) Black Future ’88. Along the way, we discuss the importance of game developers taking inspiration from things other than games, the joys of disengaging from monoculture, … Continue reading "A Better and Weirder World Than This One, with Don Bellenger"...
Aug 24, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 115. A Musical Story takes place in the mind of a musician, and it also takes place in an era when rock as a wide-open experimental space, and the album was the thing, and every album was in some sense a concept album. The game is likewise an experiment in telling a … Continue reading "This Sense of Freedom, with Charles Bardin"
Aug 10, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 114. UNBEATABLE is a rhythm game, and an adventure game, and it’s serious about being fully both. More than that, it’s a game about the emotional truths of music, and of being in a band, and a piece of art about the connection between making art and doing crimes. In this episode, … Continue reading "Make Art, Do Crimes, with D-Cell Games"
Jul 27, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 113. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a big heartfelt spectacle of a game—you’ve likely seen some of its dream-vibrant, mirror-polished visuals, and a bit of its cartoony gunplay—and as the game’s Lead Writer, Lauren Mee had a huge amount to do with the heartfelt part of that equation. Rift Apart is … Continue reading "Hope Too Is Rad, with Lauren Mee"...
Jul 14, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 112. Tali Faulkner (better known in internet circles as Veselekov) knew he had something timely on his hands when he made Umurangi Generation, but he couldn’t have known how timely. The base game was inspired by the fires in Australia in 2019, not the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—but with its themes of … Continue reading "How to See Everything Neoliberalism Ignores, with Tali Faulkner (a.k.a. Veselekov)"...
Jun 29, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 111. Amid the E3 madness, this crush of new games and games yet to be, we thought we’d take a moment and think a bit about games that are, in one way or another, not new. Let’s talk about games that we replay, and especially the ones that we keep revisiting at … Continue reading "On Replays, Remasters, and Remakes"
Jun 15, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 110. Xalavier Nelson Jr. is an absurdly prolific artist and an inveterate collaborator, having left his creative stamp on Hypnospace Outlaw, We Are The Caretakers, Can Androids Pray, Mr. Bucket Told Me To, and so, so much else, from tabletop RPG systems to comics to games journalism. Currently he’s working on SkateBIRD … Continue reading "As Joyously and Explicitly as You Can, into the Fleshy Breach, with Xalavier Nelson Jr."...
Jun 01, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 109. Yadu Rajiv does a whole lot of different things, all of them to do with games and the people and technologies that make them possible. By day, he’s a Lead Game Designer at BYJU’S, working on educational games that toe the line between physical and digital, and the rest of the … Continue reading "Making Space to Make Games, with Yadu Rajiv"...
May 18, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 108. Santago Zapata stops by to talk about the history of roguelikes, his own expansive body of small works for the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, and his larger works, from Castlevania Roguelike, to Ananias, to his current project NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén. Is it a roguelike, this new game? The purists would say (and … Continue reading "An Accidental Genre, with Santiago Zapata (a.k.a. Slashie)"...
May 04, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 107. Jeremy Warmsley’s music has spanned pop (or more broadly, the whole touring band thing), film, television, radio, and recently, games. He’s an inventive, thoughtful, ever-expressive voice wherever he shows up (including on podcasts, as it happens). Here we mostly talk about his game soundtracking work on Russell’s Quinn’s Linda & Joan, … Continue reading "The Mayonnaise Allegory, with Jeremy Warmsley"...
Apr 20, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 106. Russell Quinn has had a unique career as a technologist enabling stories, building the underlying systems for the ahead-of-its time McSweeney’s app, as well as for the equally-ahead-of-theirs, novel-adjacent multimedia projects The Silent History and The Pickle Index. He’s brought remarkably inventive and playful stories to the world, though not as … Continue reading "The Futures of Stories, with Russell Quinn"...
Apr 06, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 105. Chevy Ray has been making games for a long time now—though most of them are currently tough to play; RIP Flash—but is probably best known for Ikenfell, a tactical RPG about going to magic school, working through difficult relationships, and petting a great many cats. Here Chevy talks about what it … Continue reading "A Nuanced Critique of Subtlety, with Chevy Ray"...
Mar 23, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 104. Anisa Sanusi is an accomplished UI/UX designer, probably best known for her work on Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster—two utterly different games that bring with them utterly different challenges in terms of usability, accessibility, tone, and scope. She’s also the founder of the Limit Break mentorship program, an organization dedicated to … Continue reading "Designing for Empathy, with Anisa Sanusi"...
Mar 09, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 103. Chris King of Batterystaple Games shares a chunk of his time to discuss 30XX, the reimagined, souped-up sequel to the Mega Man X-esque roguelike-alike 20XX. We get pretty far into the weeds as far as the differences between the two games, the double-edged beam-sword of encouraging player-created content from day one, … Continue reading "Rogue Chunks, with Chris King"...
Feb 23, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 102. Our America puts you in the shoes of a Black father driving his son to school—and if that doesn’t sound potentially harrowing to you, then you might be exactly the project’s intended audience. It’s a work that means to illuminate, instruct, challenge, and speak simple, difficult truths. In this interview, Bryant … Continue reading "Experiencing America, with Bryant Young"...
Feb 09, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 101. You might know Chel Wong from her rightly-celebrated, highly modular soundtrack to Kine, and some more people are about to know her from Watch This Space. But you definitely already know her if you’re even tangentially involved in the Boston-area indie scene (or for that matter, the New England Smash scene). … Continue reading "Communities and Modularities, with Chel Wong"...
Jan 26, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 100. For our hundredth episode, we’re trying something a little different and editing together some of our favorite moments from the past year of the ‘cast. If you’ve been looking to catch up but haven’t had the time to dive into entire longform interviews, then this should provide a good place to … Continue reading "What We Heard and What We Learned in 2020"...
Jan 05, 2021•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 99. 2020, everybody. It was a weird year for lots of things, we think it’s fair to say—including but by no means limited to games. So in this episode, we take a moment to recap the games we played this year, the games currently glistening atop (or languishing deep within) our to-read … Continue reading "What We Played (and What We Didn’t) in 2020"...
Dec 22, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 98. Like Eliza before it, Möbius Front ’83 is a Zachtornics game that longtime Zachtronics fans probably didn’t expect—though also like Eliza, it has more than a few themes in common with the rest of the catalog, and beyond that, Möbius Front ’83 adheres to Zach-like conventions more closely than you might … Continue reading "The Work of War, with Zach Barth"...
Dec 08, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 97. The PlayStation 5 is out, as is the Xbox Series X and Series S Series! That’s exciting, at least for those of us who can get our hands on them. Drew’s been PS5ing, and he and Lucio both built new PCs this year, so now seemed like a fairly ideal time … Continue reading "The Latest Generation"
Nov 24, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 96. After a decade working on the Assassin’s Creed games, Nick Guérin joined Thunder Lotus Games as the Creative Director on Spiritfarer, a farming and management sim about death, kindness, labor, wants, needs, and all manner of other things that Assassin’s Creed (venerable though it is) rarely finds the space to explore. … Continue reading "This Kindness unto Death, with Nick Guérin"...
Nov 10, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 95. Brian Handy stops by to discuss Wild Honesty, his game of, well, wild honesty. Just how do you design an experience of radical openness and ever-expanding intimacy? How do you then adapt that networked play, with all its extra layers of isolation and all the kinds of human connection it lack … Continue reading "Art, Honestly, with Brian Handy"
Oct 27, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast ETAO Podcast, Episode 94. Oskar Stålberg builds little town dioramas, as he puts it—or more exactly, he builds the procedural generation tools that allow him, and his algorithms, and you the player to build little town dioramas together. You could call this an extension of his work on the “megamap” in The Division, and certainly … Continue reading "Math and Art, with Oskar Stålberg"...
Oct 13, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast 
