Everybody's Talking At Once

Juan Vaca chooses to adventure with us—into his work at Telltale Games, at Endless Entertainment, and now at the burgeoning interactive team at Netflix. We talk about Juan's approach to narrative, the oft-ignored importance of theme , and his longstanding interest in using existing characters and worlds to tell original stories. We also talk about Juan's life as a veteran, the emptiness of "suppor...

Greg Batha has done a remarkable variety of creative/technical work, from the interface of Dream Daddy, to live visualizations for touring musicians, to the hectic and adorable puzzle battler bit bit blocks. What brings it all together, he explains in this wide-ranging interview, is the desire to do things in a given medium that can only be done in that medium. Come for the actually quite workable...

Jim Guthrie joins us to reflect on his storied soundtracking career, from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and BELOW, to Indie Game: The Movie, to (implicitly, here) Reigns: Her Majesty and Planet Coaster —not to mention his auspicious and only-semi-separate indie rock career, the joys and sorrows of playing live, and Bandcamp's mad scheme to press its own vinyl (with the BELOW OST being an...

Zach Chandler catches the bus with us and talks about Nth Dimension[al] Hiking, his gently arcane spectral traverse-'em-up. We discuss Zach's guiding principle, namely that if you're going to make a game that isn't obvious, then you'd better be sure that it's nonetheless truthful. That's easier said than done, of course, and we spend some time talking about the doing, and about why it matters. And...

Jordan Thomas hides out with us to talk about The Blackout Club. It's a game that is at once an "infinite meaning machine" and an authored narrative, a game about "extremely rewarding movement" but not "physical combat with a clear victor," an early access experience that shares much of the appeal of ARGs, but not an ARG as such—and being a horror co-op game about teenagers, it's scary and it's fu...

Jay Tholen remembers the internet of the '90s, when things were a few shades dorkier, and whole lot less smoothed-over and centrally managed—and especially the internet of the late 90s, when an end-of-days urgency and paranoia hung over all of that. Hypnospace Outlaw is in some ways his attempt to capture that time, but it's also about the travails of the present-day internet, and about our relati...

Brian Fairbanks' game Lost and Hound brings together a whole lot of his passions—from meaningful soundscapes, to accessibility, to dogs. In this episode, we start by talking about Host and Hound and end up talking about mainstream games that are (often, accidentally) accessible, audiogames that are build from the ground up for blind players (and are pretty compelling to sighted players, too), and...

In lieu of a guest this week, we humbly present a conversation that Drew and Lucio recorded just before GDC, all about what it means to play a game wrong ?from misunderstanding mechanics, to knowingly ignoring objectives and incentives, to adding one's own layer of rules for tournament play or speedruning. Playing wrong can be a joyful, exciting, healthy-as-hell thing. It can reveal thematic and m...

Evan Hill drops in to talk a little about Solar Ash Kingdom and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and a whole lot about his current work at Naughty Dog—though don't expect any new details on The Last of Us Part II itself. Evan keeps that close, and fair enough. What he does talk about is just what a level designer designs, thereby frustrating our casual notions of auteur theory on the one hand, and of d...

C. Andrew Rohrmann (also known as scntfc, previously known as Scientific American, and alternately known by some pseudonyms that we're not at liberty to disclose) stops by to talk about reactive soundtracks, "the mutability of music," his notion of "anonymous ubiquity," and his work on games like Oxenfree, Afterparty, Old Man's Journey, ELOH, GALAK-Z, Virtual Virtual Reality, Crackdown 2, and Supe...

Robin Baumgarten's work doesn't fit neatly into any single category or tradition. He makes games that are also toys, and also art installations, and also unusually beguiling lamps, and also—most straightforward to experience, most difficult to describe—simply objects that make the world a little stranger a little more beautiful whenever and wherever you encounter them. In this episode, Robin wobbl...

Philip Buchanan went indie so that he could finish 39 Days to Mars, a consummately silly co-op-as-comedy physics-and-gadgets puzzle-'em-up rendered in florid trichromatic line drawings and bone-dry Britishisms. The result is as delightful as any cuppa could hope to be be. In this episode, Philip stops by to talk about the joys of being a solo developer, the importance of collaborating even so, and...

Rami Ismail wants everyone to be able to make games. "Literally anybody anywhere" should be able to work in this medium that has the potential to transcend not only cultural and national boundaries, but language. The work of including everyone is, of course, not trivial—but Rami is attempting to do the work, and the collaborative, yearlong game-a-day project Meditations serves as one particularly...

Gabby DaRienzo stops by to talk about her work as one half of the core Laundry Bear Games team, from A Mortician's Tale (and Tracktoons ) to their still-in-its-early-days next project—as well as her excellent, now-concluded podcast Play Dead , and her extensive and varied freelance work on Celeste, Parkitect, Graceful Explosion Machine, and the upcoming Super Crush K.O. ( among other fine videogam...

Greg Kasavin descends and/or ascends to our realm to talk about Hades, Supergiant's roguelike recently surprise-released into Early Access on Epic Games' brand new storefront. We talk about how Hades both builds on and departs from Supergiant's previous games (Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre), and then we talk a great deal about the infinite applicability of Greek myth to daily life—as stories about...

As 2018 winds down, esteemed ETAO Podcast producer Frances Michelle Lopez sits down to talk about what we played in 2018, what we're looking forward to playing in 2019, and what's currently sitting in our to-read piles. We couldn't get to everything, during this conversation or throughout this year. We never can. There are too many games, too many excellent games, games forever and everywhere and...

Heather Flowers talks EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER: Powered by Blood (and the MEATPUNKS material beyond). We talk about body horror, episodic storytelling and serialization, the anger and clarity of punk, the multiplicity and illegibility of punk, and the process of creating EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER on a schedule that's more MODERATE MEATPUNKS SOME OF THE TIME. SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS START AT 20:14. —...

ARMS got announced with the Switch, and it launched with the Switch, and it's been both passionately loved and broadly ignored . Lucio was late to the Switch party, and thus late to the ARMS party, but he's been pretty taken with the game. We've played together a bunch, and had about as much fun as we've ever had with a 3D fighting game. Almost a year and a half on, what exactly is ARMS' place in...

Headliner: NoviNews puts you in the shoes of he/she/xe who curates the news in a country that is rapidly going strange, and just as rapidly becoming politically unstable. It's a game about information as a tool, news as a product, and ideology as a career. We talk about the process of being even-handed and open minded without slipping into being anything so soppy and unhelpful as neutral or, for t...

Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux (collectively known as Almost A Game) stop by for a Halloween-as-hell chat about their whimsical tabletop skulduggery simulator, Wicked Apples. We talk about the unique joys of tabletop games—and of digital game, for that matter, and about translating each to the other. We also discuss the ever-rewarding oh-so-fine-line of making all-ages macabre: making it less gri...

Henrik Pettersson introduces us to The Gardens Between, a wordless narrative puzzle game in which you play as time itself. We talk about themes surrounding memory, the quest to make complicated games simple (and vice-versa), the seemingly-ever-in-progress indiepocolypse, and a few untranslatable Swedish words. Oh, and SPOILERS for Persona 5 from 01:03:38 to 01:05:15, for some damn reason. ——— • Di...

Greg Lobanov swings by to walk about Wandersong, with its happy-go-lucky approach to world-in-the-balance storytelling, its massive 110-tune soundtrack, and its uncommonly rich sound scapes. We talk about the collaborate process that brought the game to life, the thinking behind a music-driven game, and how our emotional connections to games—both in the moment and in retrospect—can be so utterly d...

Josie Brechner (a.k.a. Visager) talks about her OST work in EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER, Blossom Tales, Spice of Life, Gay Monster Kiss Club, and my electric heart, not to mention her other music, including the Songs for Unmade Worlds series. She makes wonderful music, for games both real and imagined (as well for for things that are not games, and for its own sake) . We talk about how subtlety is f...

Max Arocena (a.k.a. Colorfiction) hangs out on his porch, amid a rising squall of crickets, to discuss 0°N 0°W (a.k.a. Zero North Zero West ), his carefully crafted new dream-'em-up. We discuss the rich possibilities of games without gameplay as such, the incomparable surreality of roadtrips, and the odd connections between working at an architecture firm—Max's old job—and creating spaces in video...

Zach Barth is back to talk about EXAPUNKS, and the cyber-lanche (always create new hyphenate words, in accordance with the WIRED style guide) of questions that the game raises: Do we miss something by wringing our hands about privacy when what's really at stake in an increasingly computerized world is agency? Is our reality going weirder, or do we just think that because we're getting older (or ar...