The Killscreen Podcast

I talk with three people who build dread out of ordinary rooms. Sophie Winqvist Loggins shot Aniara , Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's adaptation of Harry Martinson's poem about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars. Max Friberg is creative director at Housefire , the studio behind the surrealist horror game Eclipsium . Johanna Kasurinen co-founded Wrong Organ and leads art and nar...

I open with Sagan Yee's Last Call for the Redding District , a 3D narrative game that asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. You swim home to a town modeled on Saskatoon, catch up with everyone you went to school with, decide who to spawn with, and then everyone dies. Danny Snelson, who advised Sagan's MFA thesis at UCLA, joins me to talk through clips from my int...

I sit down with two composers who make audiences flinch for a living. Ryan Holladay scored Zach Cregger's Weapons and this year's Resident Evil with his brother Hays. Jason Graves wrote the music for the original Dead Space trilogy, Until Dawn and Still Wakes the Deep . This is the first of Killscreen's Cross-Conversations: Horror , three free talks presented with MUBI that put people who make hor...

I open with a fan who has rebuilt P.T.  from its own PS4 code , which raises the question under the whole hour: when a game can disappear, who is responsible for keeping it? Danny Snelson calls in from New York with a ZipDeck in tow, and we take a detour through Zach Cregger's Resident Evil , which Danny calls a faithful betrayal. The A story is my interview with Murlo , the Manchester producer Ch...

I open with Cezar Mocan's satellite , which finds a lake missing from the place its own records insist it should be, and would rather produce testimony than admit it does not know. The question I put to Danny Snelson runs through the rest of the hour: what happens when unreliability is the design decision instead of the defect? The through line for this cycle is what a machine does at the edge of...

I open with Tomo Kihara, a Tokyo designer who has built an arcade cabinet that nobody scripted, and put a question to Danny Snelson that runs through the whole hour: what happens to authorship when the designer does not know the outcome either? The through line for this cycle is work built to outlast the thing it was made on. Kihara's What Plays You? Game of Possible Lives is a cabinet running a l...

I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container? Ed Smith's piece on Resident Evil 2 called horror architecture "anatomically correct but tonally wrong." D...

When Bennett Foddy was a fellow at Oxford, the college sold off its wine cellar and let the fellows judge the bottles. After twenty-four samples, the one that stopped him tasted like gasoline. That is now roughly how he picks games, and it turns out to be a useful way to think about difficulty, taste and what a player is actually looking for. Danny Snelson of UCLA joins for a new format: one piece...

Something a little different! We're focusing on the newsletter now and in a conversational way! This week, I sat down with Danny Snelson, a writer and professor at UCLA who spends his days thinking about the eerie. We start with a strange admission from this year's Venice Biennale, where the Chinese pavilion exhibited a video game you weren't allowed to play, and use it to chase a bigger idea: tha...

Catmilk is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called Gossamer Matrix for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value floor by floor. The premise is deliberately hyperviolent. The color palette is, improbably, pink. What ca...

Lisa Jamhoury is an artist and performer working at the intersection of the physical body and computation. Her Capture Series —five years in the making—investigates what it means to live through digital representations of ourselves. Lossy , the newest piece in the series, had its world premiere at South by Southwest 2025. In this episode, I talk with Lisa about how a traumatic car accident sent he...

In this episode, I talk with Greek artist Kyriaki Goni about Telling the Bees —her in-development game about a character called the Bee-Seeker, searching for the last surviving bees in a near-future Aegean archipelago on the edge of ecological collapse. We get into the ritual that gives the game its name, the anthropological research behind every design decision, and why she wants players to physi...

Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent fifteen years building a practice that doesn't fit neatly into any single category. He's not a game designer in the commercial sense. He's not exactly a filmmaker or a sculptor. He's someone using the tools of game engines to document ecologies that are disappearing. In this conversation, we talk about how he started modifying Unreal Tournament at 12 and never really...

I sat down with Lou Faroux —French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on The Sims , why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet collapse as an art subject rather than a catastrophe. Lou's practice is hard to categorize, which is exactly why I find it so interesting. She uses game engines, deepfakes, found footage, and AI av...

What does it cost—materially, ethically, psychologically—to make digital art about the climate crisis? I brought together two artists who are building things inside the very systems they're critiquing. Kara Stone is a game designer based in Calgary who runs Solar Server , a solar-powered web server hosting low-carbon games from her apartment balcony. Her latest game, Known Mysteries , is set in a...

Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are the Canadian theater-makers behind asses.masses — an eight-hour live RPG where an audience shares a single controller to guide a group of unemployed donkeys fighting to reclaim their labor from machines. It's toured from Helsinki to Los Angeles, and after 55 performances, no two shows have ever gone the same way. In this conversation, we talk about how they buil...

What does it mean to really listen to a game? Vadim Nickel is a researcher and game developer at Concordia University who studies exactly that question. His recent survey of sound-first games—titles where music and sound drive the action rather than just accompany it—turns up only 43 examples across nearly four decades of game history. That scarcity is itself the story. We talk about why the tools...

Symoné is a British-American interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of circus, dance, and game technologies. Her piece Nullspace Motel is a one-hour live performance where audience members are pulled from their seats to play a custom video game — and what they do shapes the story unfolding on stage in real time. In this conversation, we talk about how a childhood encounter with Katam...

Competition dance trained young girls to hold their bodies in anticipation of judgment—to perform flawlessly, make difficulty look effortless, and measure themselves in real time against a crowd. TikTok rewarded all of that. This was not a coincidence. In this episode, I'm writing about Maya Man's StarQuest, a lecture-performance I saw at LA Dance Project—a work built from 111 AI-generated eight-s...

Toby Alden is a game designer and DJ based in Los Angeles. Their platformer Love Eternal — released today — is an eight-year collaboration with their brother Sam that grew from an earlier, near-unbeatable freeware game called Love . In this conversation, Toby talks about making music and games in parallel, the surprising amount of work a single animation frame can do, why they let the story operat...

In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific changed anthropology forever, introducing the world to "thick description" and the rigors of deep fieldwork. A century later, researcher Michael Hoffman is bringing that text into the future. In this episode, Jamin Warren sits down with Hoffman—a computer scientist and anthropologist at one of Germany’s premier supercomputing centers...

Swedish studio Simogo spent their first five years making seven games— Year Walk , Device 6 , Sailor's Dream —then two games over the next decade. Their new Legacy Collection preserves that early mobile work by recreating the iPhone itself inside modern platforms, complete with virtual gestures and motion controls. Simon Flesser talks about the decade-long conversation that led to preservation, th...

There's already a game about the Haitian Revolution. It's part of Assassin's Creed. You sneak around, you stab people, you "free the slaves"—and the game gives you an achievement notification. Dom Rabrun thinks that's bullshit. The Haitian-American painter and game designer is building Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer, a game about the Haitian Revolution that refuses to let you pick up a weapon. Instead, yo...

Big Buck Hunter made a quarter billion dollars by perfecting one thing: the tactile pleasure of pulling a trigger. This arcade shooter stripped hunting down to its essential tension—the moment before you fire, when your heart jumps and your hand trembles—then packaged it for drunk people in Brooklyn bars. We read Jason Fagone's 2010 profile of the game's creator George Petro, who understood that t...

War games let you be a hero. Alan Kwan's games make you helpless. In this conversation, we explore Scent —a 20-minute experience where you play a dog witnessing an unnamed war. No shooting. No saving. Just survival, souls, and the anxiety of watching violence you can't stop. Kwan spent seven years developing Scent with no budget, transforming it from a sci-fi project about his father losing vision...