Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe ESRB: How Video Games Rated Themselves to Keep Congress Out
Episode 11175
In 1993 the United States Senate was in a moral panic over Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. This episode traces how that pressure, along with retailers …
4 days, 14 hours ago
Chrono Trigger: The Dream Team, Time Travel, and a 4MB Masterpiece
Episode 11174
In 1992 Square assembled what it called the Dream Team: Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and manga legend A…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Cuphead: How Two Brothers Bet Their Homes on 1930s Animation
Episode 11173
Cuphead looks like a lost 1930s cartoon and plays like a relentless bullet hell that has made seasoned gamers break controllers. This episode follows…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Dig Dug: Namco's Strategic Digging Game and Its Bizarre Family Tree
Episode 11172
In 1982, while the industry was obsessed with Pac-Man style mazes, Namco handed players a solid block of earth and let them carve their own paths. Th…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Ms. Pac-Man: The Bootleg Arcade Queen Erased by Corporate IP Law
Episode 11171
One of the most successful icons of the 1980s began as an unauthorized modification and ended up scrubbed from modern code and replaced by a lookalik…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Donkey Kong: How 2,000 Failed Cabinets Created Mario and Nintendo
Episode 11170
In 1981 Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa imported 3,000 Radar Scope arcade cabinets and sold barely a thousand of them, leaving 2,000 hea…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Eric Barone and Stardew Valley: One Man's Five-Year Solo Marathon
Episode 11169
In 2011 Eric Barone graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma with a computer science degree, could not land a tech job, and took work as an…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Street Fighter II: The Glitch That Invented the Combo System
Episode 11168
A bug found while testing the car-smashing bonus stage of Street Fighter II accidentally created the combo system, the foundational mechanic of every…
4 days, 14 hours ago
Hollow Knight: From One-Star Flash Game to 15 Million Sales
Episode 11167
Hollow Knight's DNA traces back to Hungry Knight, a 2013 web game on Newgrounds that earned a dismal one-star rating. This episode follows Ari Gibson…
4 days, 14 hours ago
How a Free Warcraft III Mod Became DOTA and Built Modern Esports
Episode 11166
Defense of the Ancients started in 2003 as a custom map built inside Blizzard's Warcraft III world editor by anonymous, unpaid modders. It went on to…
4 days, 14 hours ago