The Video Game History Hour

Game historian, journalist, and content creator Kim Justice joins us to talk about the commercial and critical disappointment, though surprisingly influential, Jurassic Park: Trespasser. In her recent documentary Jurassic Park: Trespasser – A Failure That Stood The Test Of Time | Kim Justice we’re taken through her six part story of its development, its failings,…

We sit down with Jimmy Maher, author of The Digital Antiquarian, to examine his recent four part series: The Ratings Game. This series takes a look at how games came to have age ratings, why it was inevitable and necessary, and the fascinating butterfly effects that came because of it. Maher draws a very clear…

Felipe Pepe is here to showcase his collaborative, non-profit project to create a historical guide to computer role playing games: The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games. What CRPG’s around the world are cool, interesting, historically important, popular, meaningful, and why are they so? Each entry highlights a game’s eccentricities, context of the…

Diving into the history of the Xbox in his recent long read, Bet on Black: How Microsoft and Xbox Changed Pop Culture, Part 1, David L. Craddock goes back to the time of JezzBall, Age of Empires, and trusty ‘ol Minesweeper: the games that kept us entertained while someone else in the house was using…

Eric Switzer joins us to share the development and downfall of Darkwatch in his article The Untold Story Of Darkwatch. A vampiric haunted western, Darkwatch could have, in another universe, been a major franchise. But, through a series of acquisitions and mandated pivots, its storyline deadended after only one title. Will this long silent universe…

Our podcasting duo takes us back to the dawning of real-time computer games: Spacewar! Alex Smith joins us for round two, being our second second-time guest, to pairaphrase the history of this 2-player game of binary ships thrusting around a gravity-well star, who (reluctantly) wrote it, who modded it, who played it, and who created…

Ben Hanson returns to the show to bring us The Oral History Of PopCap Games, a not 4 hour long video in which we learn how the “colors game” spawned the casual juggernaut Bejeweled, the black sheep in the corner made all the money, the PopCap Burrito won’t give us Plants Vs Zombies on our…

Dr. Sparkle, the creator of Chrontendo, takes us through his more than decade long project to analyze every commercially released game for the NES and Famicom in chronological order while simultaneously spinning off this already massive show into two more: Chronsega and Chronturbo. If you’re ever looking for something to do with your free time,…

Raven Simone takes us down the research rabbit hole she fell into while making her video The Girl Games Of Lost Media – Documentary. With few clues to follow, she started researching the Mean Girls game, but soon found herself chasing down info on Clueless and Pretty in Pink as well, discovering that research can…

Should Monkey Island be made into a movie? Could it be? Jack Yarwood lays out the history of how this project almost came to be as well as why it gave up the ghost, instead. He, Frank, and Kelsey cross swords over if this could have been a glorious triumph*, like Super Mario Bros.: The…