Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAnimal Crossing: How a Healing Life Sim Became a Global Phenomenon
Episode 11097
Mr. Resetti, the hard-hat mole who yelled at players for not saving, lost his job when autosave became standard and was quietly reassigned to a rescu…
5 days, 6 hours ago
AlphaGo: How DeepMind's AI Conquered Go and Beat Lee Sedol
Episode 11096
In late 2016, an anonymous player called Master and Magister logged onto elite online Go servers and beat the world's best human players 60 times in …
5 days, 6 hours ago
Alexey Pajitnov: The Soviet Mathematician Who Invented Tetris
Episode 11095
Alexey Pajitnov created one of the most played games in human history and did not see a penny of royalties for more than a decade. This deep dive fol…
5 days, 6 hours ago
Age of Empires: Smart Villagers, Fair AI, and 30 Years of History Gaming
Episode 11094
When Ensemble Studios set out to build a historical strategy game, they skipped the university archives and went to the children's section of the pub…
5 days, 6 hours ago
Super Mario Bros: How 40 Kilobytes and World 1-1 Reinvented Game Design
Episode 11093
The original working concept for Super Mario Bros. had its hero strapped into a rocket ship blasting enemies with a beam gun. This deep dive explains…
5 days, 6 hours ago
Hideo Kojima: From Metal Gear's Stealth Genre to Death Stranding
Episode 11092
At a late-1980s wedding, a groom apologized that his talented friend had inexplicably joined a video game company, and the room laughed. That friend …
5 days, 6 hours ago
Gunpei Yokoi: The Game Boy Creator and Lateral Thinking with Withered Tech
Episode 11091
Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 as a maintenance worker fixing the machines that printed hanafuda playing cards. When president Hiroshi Yamauchi…
5 days, 6 hours ago
Leeroy Jenkins: How a Staged World of Warcraft Raid Became a Cultural Icon
Episode 11090
On May 11, 2005, the Pals for Life guild huddled outside the Rookery in Upper Blackrock Spire, calculating a 32.33 percent chance of survival for a p…
5 days, 6 hours ago
Gabe Newell: Microsoft Dropout, Valve, Steam, and the Digital Revolution
Episode 11089
As a teenager, Gabe Newell delivered paper telegrams by bicycle for Western Union. Decades later he built an 11 billion dollar empire by dismantling …
5 days, 6 hours ago
The Oregon Trail: From a 1971 Teleprinter Game to a Hollywood Musical
Episode 11088
In 1971, Carleton College senior Don Rawitsch needed a way to make westward expansion interesting for an eighth-grade history class. With friends Pau…
5 days, 6 hours ago