Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Golden Age of Arcades: How Quarters Built an 8 Billion Dollar Empire
Episode 11207
In late-1970s Japan, an urban legend claimed the 100 yen coin was vanishing from circulation because every one of them had been swallowed by Space In…
2 days, 10 hours ago
Ken and Roberta Williams: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line
Episode 11206
In 1979 Ken Williams brought home a teletype terminal to write business software. His wife Roberta found Colossal Cave Adventure on it, got hooked, a…
2 days, 10 hours ago
Rare: From Reverse-Engineering the Famicom to Sea of Thieves
Episode 11205
In the mid-1980s Nintendo claimed its Famicom was impossible to reverse-engineer without proprietary documentation. British brothers Tim and Chris St…
2 days, 10 hours ago
Richard Garriott, Ultima, and the Day Players Killed Lord British
Episode 11204
In August 1997, during the Ultima Online beta test, a random player assassinated Lord British, the supposedly invincible in-game alter ego of creator…
2 days, 10 hours ago
Tomohiro Nishikado and the Accidental Genius of Space Invaders
Episode 11203
Imagine creating the highest-grossing entertainment product of your era, being contractually forbidden from taking credit, and being bad at playing i…
2 days, 10 hours ago
The Konami Code: How a Forgotten Cheat Became a Global Cultural Handshake
Episode 11202
Type a 40-year-old sequence of keystrokes on a specific Bank of Canada web page about a commemorative 10 dollar bill and the site starts playing an 8…
2 days, 10 hours ago
MissingNo: The Pokémon Red and Blue Glitch That Became Gaming Legend
Episode 11201
Take a wrong step at the edge of a carefully curated virtual world and you find a digital ghost: a scrambled block of static that showers you with in…
2 days, 10 hours ago
Duke Nukem Forever: Inside the 14-Year Development Hell at 3D Realms
Episode 11200
Think about who you were in 1997, then who you were in 2011. In that entire span, one studio was trapped inside a single project. This episode dissec…
2 days, 10 hours ago
The Console Wars: From Nintendo's Lockout Chip to Xbox Game Pass
Episode 11199
It is May 1995 at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo. Sega has just announced the Saturn is launching that very day at 399 dollars. A Sony execu…
2 days, 10 hours ago
Henk Rogers: From Tetris and the Soviet Union to Mars Habitats in Hawaii
Episode 11198
The man who got Tetris out of the Soviet Union and onto the Game Boy is now building simulated Mars habitats on a Hawaiian volcano and pushing states…
2 days, 10 hours ago