A Trip Down Memory Card Lane

In 2006, Rockstar Vancouver released Bully , an open world action game about a fifteen year old troublemaker surviving a year at a boarding school, and a moral panic arrived long before anyone had played it. On today's episode, David and guest host, Ryan Shepherd, trace how six developers who walked away from a struggling Vancouver studio founded Barking Dog Studios, and how that small team ended...

In 1994, SETA Corporation released Nosferatu for the Super Famicom, a gothic horror platformer that borrowed its title from a banned 1922 film while its Japanese opening quietly calls the villain Count Dracula. On today's episode, we use that tangled name as a doorway into three centuries of vampire history. We trace the ancient night demons of Mesopotamia and Greece, the Balkan grave exhumations...

In 2014, Monolith Productions released Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor , an open world action game built around the Nemesis System, a procedurally generated enemy hierarchy that let every orc remember, evolve, and hold a grudge. On today's episode, David and the guys trace how the game grew out of a cancelled Batman project, dig into the Tolkien lore buried in the appendices that shaped Talion and...

In 1982, Pac-Man: The Animated Series became the first television show ever built around a video game character, arriving on ABC just months after federal deregulation opened the door for merchandise driven cartoons to dominate Saturday mornings. David is joined by guest host Ryan Shepherd, filling in for Rob, to trace how Hanna Barbera chased the rights for two years, how a wrong number cast the...

In 2001, Nintendo released the GameCube , a console built almost entirely as a direct answer to everything that went wrong with the Nintendo 64. David, Rob, and friends trace the console's origins back to a collapsing hardware partner, a deal that fell apart before it ever began, and the strange path that led Nintendo to the small startup that finally built its chips. They dig into the tradeoffs b...

In 2003, Valve quietly launched a piece of software that almost nobody noticed, and that same software would go on to define modern PC gaming. This week, David Kassin and guest host David Seley trace how Steam grew out of Valve's frustration with patching Counter-Strike, why the company got turned down everywhere it went looking for help, and how a disastrous Half-Life 2 launch nearly sank the pla...

In 1991, Civilization shipped from a company that barely wanted to publish it, the culmination of a promise Sid Meier had made to himself eleven years earlier, to write the ultimate strategy game. This week, David, Rob, and returning guest Damon Robson trace how it came together, from banned office prototypes and a bank job making games about money, through MicroProse and Bruce Shelley's daily fee...

In 2009, Rocksteady Studios released Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game that would hold the Guinness World Record for most critically acclaimed superhero game ever. On today's episode, we trace how a small studio rising from bankruptcy built a masterpiece through restraint. We explore the philosophy that guided every decision: identify what makes Batman Batman and protect it from everything else. We in...

In 1980, two college students at UC Santa Cruz set out to build a game that could surprise even the people who made it. Rogue spread across university computer systems without ever being sold, made its creators almost nothing, and quietly gave an entire genre its name. Dave and Rob trace the full story, from Michael Toy's first encounter with a mainframe at his father's nuclear facility, through t...

In 1981, IBM was the most dominant force in computing the world had ever seen, and the last company anyone expected to build a machine for the home. This week, we trace how a rejected 1979 business plan turned into the IBM Personal Computer , following the reluctant path from Frank Cary's boardroom to a renegade engineering team in Boca Raton, Florida. We explore how a manager named Don Estridge b...

In 2003, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles brought the Final Fantasy name back to a Nintendo console for the first time in nearly a decade, and it did so by way of one of the strangest corners of Square's history. In this episode, David and Rob trace how the box office failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within nearly sank the company, and how that crisis led Square to build a walled off subsidia...

In 1998, Namco released Soulcalibur , the sequel to its hit weapons based fighting game Soul Edge. In this episode, David and Rob trace why producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama refused to just call it Soul Edge 2, and how designers Koh Onda and Koji Mitsunaga rebuilt the cast around defiance instead of fate. They dig into the accidental discovery behind the eight way run system, the roster built backwards...

In 2010, Limbo arrived on Xbox Live Arcade as a silent, monochrome puzzle platformer built almost entirely on what it refused to explain. David and Rob trace creator Arnt Jensen's six year path from a solitary sketch of a beach and a cave to the founding of Playdead alongside producer Dino Patti, and how that small studio grew to include designer Jeppe Carlsen and composer Martin Stig Andersen. Th...

In 1985, Datasoft released Alternate Reality: The City , an Atari 8-bit role playing game built almost entirely by one self-taught programmer working out of a shack in the Hawaiian backwoods. In this episode, we explore how Philip Price talked his way from a stolen tic tac toe login into a career reverse engineering hardware with no manuals to guide him. We trace how he envisioned an entire interc...

In 1996, NiGHTS into Dreams asked players to fly through somebody else's dreams instead of walking through their own story, and it became one of the strangest, most singular experiences the Sega Saturn ever produced. In this episode, we trace how Yuji Naka's original idea about chasing rainbows became a dream world instead, and why Sonic Team resisted building the game in 3D until the story demand...

In 1990, a fifty-dollar plastic cartridge called the Game Genie arrived in North America and immediately became the most controversial accessory in gaming. David and Rob trace the story from a cold shoulder at a Las Vegas trade show, through the makeshift development kit that cracked Nintendo's security, to the federal court case that established what players are allowed to do with games they own....

In 1996, id Software released Quake , one of the most influential games ever made, and one that nearly destroyed the team behind it. In this episode, David and Rob Kassin trace the full arc of how Quake came to be, starting with a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, running through a year of engine development that left designers with nothing to do but wait, and ending with a shareholder confrontation,...

In 1969, Sesame Street premiered with a mission unlike anything children's television had attempted before, and thirteen years later, the Children's Television Workshop asked the same question on a new screen. In this episode, David and Rob trace the full arc of Sesame Street's history, from Joan Ganz Cooney's dinner party in 1966 to the November 10th premiere that changed children's television fo...

In 1994, Bullfrog Productions released Theme Park , a construction and management simulation that would go on to sell fifteen million copies and define a genre. In this episode, David and Rob trace the game's development from Peter Molyneux's initial concept through the year and a half of work that brought it to life, led by a seventeen-year-old programmer named Demis Hassabis working a gap year b...

In 1986, Nintendo released a Mario sequel so difficult that it never left Japan. In this episode, David and Rob trace the full story of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels from the arcade experiments that seeded its brutal design, to the twenty-five year old developer who inherited the franchise and decided mastery was the only acceptable starting point, to the decision made in a Seattle office tha...

In 2020, two brothers who had grown up eleven years and a world apart found themselves with nowhere to be and a shared love of video games. What started as an excuse to hang out became A Trip Down Memory Card Lane , a weekly video game history podcast built on a simple mission: use games to teach people something new every single week. In this special 300th episode, David and Rob Kassin turn the m...

In 2001, a mid-sized studio in Champaign, Illinois released a first-person shooter that let players blast through walls nobody told them they could blast through. Red Faction was built by a team that had lost the game they originally set out to make, working from the bones of a cancelled Descent sequel and quietly convinced the whole thing was going to fail. What they built instead was GeoMod, a g...

In 2005, Remedy Entertainment walked onto the E3 show floor with a stunning technology demonstration and one of the most ambitious pitches in gaming: an open world psychological thriller set in a hauntingly beautiful corner of the Pacific Northwest, built around a horror writer whose nightmares had come to life. What they didn't have was a game. This week, David and Rob trace the full story of Ala...

In 1986, Atari released the Atari 7800 ProSystem , a console that had actually been ready since 1984, built by an outside engineering firm called General Computer Corporation and designed to reclaim Atari's place in the living room. This week, David and Rob explore the full story of the 7800, from GCC's unlikely origins as a pair of MIT students who got sued by Atari and ended up working for them,...

In 1984, Nintendo released Golf for the Famicom, a game that almost never existed. Every developer Nintendo approached to build it turned the project down, convinced that fitting eighteen holes of course data into a Famicom cartridge was simply impossible. A twenty-three year old programmer at a tiny Tokyo company called HAL Laboratory said yes, invented his own data compression method from scratc...