Aftermath Hours

On a this week’s episode, Nathan and Gita are joined by journalist-turned-politician Kat Abughazaleh, who recently managed to nearly win the Democratic congressional primary in Illinois despite odds being stacked against her. We discuss what she learned from her narrow defeat, both in terms of politics and an unexpected tool in her fundraising arsenal: livestreaming on Twitch. We also talk about h...

On a this week’s (very special) episode, Nathan and Gita are joined by podcasting royalty, Michael Hobbes of If Books Could Kill and Maintenance Phase, to discuss Aftermath’s latest, greatest, possibly dumbest event, Woke Week, as well as Michael’s true passion: video game speedruns. What was Woke 1? What were its true ills versus those centrist pundits have wrongly tried to diagnose? And why are...

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Luke are joined by Samantha Kalman, a game developer who’s worked on everything from experimental indies to Apex Legends , to discuss her very cool-looking new game, Verses: Hyper-Kinetic Aerial Joust , and the fraught industry climate surrounding it. What does it mean that even somebody with such a proven track record has been unable to secure funding via tradit...

Today Gita and Chris are joined by our good friend Stella to talk about job precarity in the Game Dev world and her own recent troubles getting screwed over. Then we discuss Pokopia, the best game on the Nintendo Switch 2, which manages to fuse what we enjoyed about both Viva Piñata, NieR, and Dragon Quest Builders? We then answer your reader questions! Credits - Hosts: Gita Jackson, Chris Person,...

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Luke are joined by Jack Ryan – the investigative journalist, as opposed to the Tom Clancy character – to discuss his months-in-the-making report on Clickout, a secretive company that has taken to buying up once-revered video game websites like The Escapist and filling them with AI and gambling. Why is Clickout so secretive? How is it getting away with this? Why t...

On this week’s episode, Nathan is joined by two media luminaries, Polygon editor-at-large Giovanni Colantonio and freelancer/Aftermath columnist Joshua Rivera, to discuss all things Resident Evil: where it’s coming from, where it’s going, and of course, the newly released Resident Evil Requiem. The series has spent its past few installments promising a fresh start; does Requiem actually deliver, o...

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Chris, and Riley find themselves tangled in a rat king of interrelated AI stories: leftists apparently hate technology because they’re rejecting AI (and the mass exploitation that comes with it), the computer – a theoretically magical device hijacked by tech industry perverts – has become massively more expensive as a result of AI, and a former indie games luminary...

On this week’s episode, Gita and Luke welcome special guest Brendan Caldwell of the newly-launched website  jank.cool , which is all about PC gaming. Brendan is quickly learning how owning a website can be both exciting (you’re your own boss, no one else can tell you what to do or what to write about) and very scary (how even do websites work?). But if it gives you a place to publish your wei...

On this week’s episode, Nathan is joined by two very special guests – former (until, you guessed it, layoffs) Verge reporter Ash Parrish and prolific freelancer Joshua Rivera – for a special announcement: both will soon be regularly contributing to Aftermath! Ash will be blogging a day per week, and Joshua is the monthly columnist prophesied in our subscriber goals. We discuss our shared histories...

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Riley are joined by Ben Hanson of worker-owned media outlet MinnMax to talk about what it’s been like covering games – and just generally existing – amid ICE’s violent occupation of Minnesota. Ben tells us about the strange juxtaposition of tragedy (abandoned cars, large portions of the population terrified to leave their homes) and triumph (ordinary people worki...

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Chris are joined by Keza MacDonald – currently of The Guardian and formerly of Kotaku UK way back in the day – to talk about her new book, Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play . We discuss Nintendo’s vast history, dating all the way back to 1889, as well as how its innovative past gave way to the Switch 2 era, perhaps its most...

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Gita are joined by Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah, both formerly of Polygon – you know, before all the bad stuff happened – and now of the newly announced Mothership , a site at the intersection of gender and games. Maddy and Zoë tell us about their plans for the site and what it means to launch a publication like this in an era when feminist media has been gutted, a...

On our first episode of 2026, Nathan, Chris, and Riley start the year off with a bang, or at least the next best thing: a discussion about video games. We begin by reflecting on Nathan’s time attending Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual speedrunning marathon that raises money for charity and just generally rules. Gaming communities can be forces for good – at least, when they don’t allow their r...

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Chris, and Riley convene one last time to close out 2025, a notably horrible year for the world but a pretty solid one for Aftermath. We begin by talking about a controversy that was unexpected, to say the least: Larian, riding a wave of goodwill by making perhaps the ultimate example of a big game for people and by people in  Baldur’s Gate 3 , ran right off th...

This week, Gita, Riley, and Chris talk about many games that came out recently that will never win a Game Award, and what our attitudes about the event are. First, the enigmatic Ys-alike Angeline Era , a beautiful game with thoughtful design. Second, the toe tapping Rhythm Doctor which feels like it takes cues from Rhythm Tengoku and iNIS games like Ouendan . Then we discuss Skate Story , Faustian...

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Gita, and Chris are joined by the one and only John “Super Eyepatch Wolf” Walsh, YouTuber extraordinaire and, now, author of The Bizarre World Of Fake Games, a book about exactly what it says it’s about: meticulously crafted settings and rule sets for games that don’t actually exist. Walsh explains his fixation with fake games and how, as he sees it, they broaden th...

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by two of the finest internet culture reporters to ever lace up their boots and wade into the muck, Kat Tenbarge and Steven Asarch, to discuss why MrBeast’s new theme park, Beast Land, is so bad – and why quality was never the point in the first place. Spoiler alert: It’s a giant ad, as many so-called theme parks, activations, and experiences are these days. We...

This week, Chris, Riley, and Gita raise our heads above the water of Aftermath’s relaunched website to talk, excitingly, about things that aren’t relaunching a website. To start, Chris and Gita talk about the movie Bugonia , a remake of 2003’s Save the Green Planet . We talk about how it’s different from the original, for better and worse, and what it says about class, society, and whether or not...

On this week’s episode, the WHOLE gang – Nathan, Gita, Chris, Riley, Luke, Isaiah, and Nicole – gather to celebrate Aftermath’s two-year anniversary. We begin by announcing that we’re relaunching the site next week, but not with all the bullshit bells and whistles you’d typically expect from this sort of thing. Instead, it’ll still be the simple, streamlined Aftermath you’ve come to know and love,...

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Gita, and Chris bathe in the afterglow of Aftermath’s first-ever in-person party before hinting at big changes to come (the good kind) as a result of the site’s upcoming second anniversary. Then we discuss the United States government’s sudden gaming fixation, following a week of Halo memes from White House and Department Of Homeland Security accounts, as well as JD...

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Chris, and Riley discuss the recent revelation (via Bloomberg) that Microsoft has been seeking a 30 percent profit margin from its gaming division since 2023. This borders on ludicrous compared to what the rest of the industry typically achieves and fully clears that bar in the case of Xbox, which managed a 12 percent profit margin in 2022. Now here we are in 2025,...

On this week’s episode, Gita and Luke are joined by Matt Leone, formerly of Polygon and now of Design Room, a site dedicated to sharing the oral histories behind some of the biggest and most important video games of all time. We chat about Matt’s work detailing the stories behind the creation of games like Street Fighter II and Shadow Of The Colossus, how he managed to find the time and space to g...

On this week’s episode, Nathan and Luke are joined by Cameron Kunzelman of the Ranged Touch podcast network who has a book about Assassin’s Creed, Everything Is Permitted, coming out next month. We discuss how the series has evolved over the years, with each sequel and spinoff essentially functioning as an argument in favor of the series’ continued existence. Highlights include: why Brotherhood wa...

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Chris, and Gita talk about the two latest signs that the video game industry is being chopped up and sold for parts: EA’s $55 billion sale to a consortium that includes Saudi Arabia and Microsoft’s decision to up Game Pass’ price by 50 percent – the latter of which follows multiple rounds of layoffs and studio closures almost certainly intended to help pay for the c...

On this week’s episode, Chris and Riley are joined by Aftermath contributor Isaiah. First, Chris can’t resist talking more Silksong , and then he tells us a bit about Silent Hill f .  Then we move on to Sony’s State of Play presentation this week: Does Insomniac’s Wolverine need all that blood? Do we need a Deus Ex remaster when it basically makes a game from 2000 look like a game from 2004?...