My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

Abigoliah Schamaun is an American comedian, writer, actor, and podcaster whose open-hearted style has made her one of the most distinctive voices on the UK stand-up circuit. After cutting her teeth in the clubs of New York, she moved to Britain and there steadily built a reputation as a charismatic performer, becoming a popular headliner on the live comedy scene. Alongside her stand-up, she has ap...

Luke Whittaker is a British game designer and creative director. With a background in animation and games design, he co-founded the BAFTA-winning indie studio State of Play in 2008, helping establish a reputation for meticulous, hands-on craft and playful experimentation. He was the creator and lead designer of  Lumino City , the puzzle adventure built entirely from hand-made paper and card m...

Rob Dubbin is a comedy writer and game designer whose work spans late-night television, journalism, and interactive storytelling. After studying History and Literature at Harvard University , he began his career in comedy, becoming an Emmy-winning writer on The Colbert Report and later The Late Show with Stephen Colbert . Away from television, his writing has appeared in publications including The...

George Osborn is a journalist, strategist, and analyst whose work explores the increasingly fraught intersection of video games, business, and politics. He has worked as a reporter, consultant, and as Head of Campaigns and Communications at Ukie , the UK trade body for games, developing a rare vantage point on how the medium shapes, and is shaped by, power. He is also the founder of Half-Space Con...

Gabríel Ólafs is an Icelandic pianist, composer, and producer whose work blends classical tradition with fantasy and a strikingly modern sense of atmosphere. Born in Reykjavík in 1998, he began playing piano at the age of five, receiving both classical and jazz training before emerging as a recording artist while still a teenager. His debut album, Absent Minded , was released in 2019, and his subs...

Elise Kova is a fantasy novelist whose rise from online serial writer to international bestseller has made her one of the defining voices in modern fantasy. She began writing young, producing her first novella in sixth grade, and later returned to storytelling in earnest when she started Air Awakens in 2012 as a hobby, posting chapters online and building an early community of devoted readers. Aft...

Brendan Greene is a game designer whose work reshaped the landscape of competitive multiplayer video games. Raised on a barracks in County Kildare, he grew up in an army family with little more than an Atari 2600 for company. He studied Fine Art in college, taught himself web design, and spent years freelancing — even moving to Brazil — before rediscovering...

Stephen Totilo is an American journalist whose career has helped redefine how video games are reported and understood. After studying at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism , he became MTV News ’ first dedicated video game reporter in 2005, bringing serious coverage of the medium to a mainstream audience. Four years later he joined Kotaku , where he rose to become editor-in-chief and spe...

Jerk Gustafsson is a Swedish game developer whose career has been shaped by a builder’s instinct — first in the physical world, and then in virtual ones. He left school at fifteen to work as a bricklayer, before discovering PC games in his twenties through Quake , the id Software classic that opened his eyes not only to play, but to the thrill of creating spaces of his own. After teaching himself...

Chandana Ekanayake is a game developer and creative director whose career spans more than two decades of work across some of the industry’s most varied and inventive projects. Born in Sri Lanka he moved to the United States at the age of eight, and grew up watching his parents rebuild their lives from scratch—an experience that shaped both his work ethic and his creative perspective. Aft...

Natasha Hodgson is a British writer, performer, and composer for theatre, television, and audio. As a co-founder of the theatre company Spit-Lip , she co-created, co-wrote, and co-composed Operation Mincemeat, the wildly inventive musical that began life at the New Diorama Theatre in 2019 before evolving through multiple runs to become a West End phenomenon. In 2024, the show won th...

Simon Lockerby is a game creator and studio co-founder whose path into development didn’t follow a traditional games pipeline, but instead grew out of everyday play and community building. While working as a sales director, he began playing  Raid: Shadow Legends  on his daily commute, eventually turning that hobby into a YouTube channel that grew rapidly. Within a year, he...

C. Thi. Nguyen is an American philosopher whose work explores what games reveal about agency, and the ways in which metrics can shape our desires. After graduating from Harvard , he enrolled in a Ph. D. program at U.C.L.A. , completing his doctorate while simultaneously working as a food writer for the  L.A. Times —an early sign of a career that would resist tidy categories. No...

My guest today is a games industry leader whose career has spanned journalism, publishing, public policy, and cultural advocacy. He began in 2002 as an editorial assistant at trade paper MCV , quickly rising through the ranks to become editor of Develop and later editor-in-chief of both titles. In 2013 he became publisher of the two brands before moving into a new phase of his career as Head of Ga...

Felicia Day is an actress, writer, producer, and entrepreneur whose work has helped define internet-era geek culture. After studying mathematics and music performance at the University of Texas at Austin , she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, appearing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer . In 2007 she created, wrote, and starred in The Guild , the pioneering web series about a group of MMO players t...

Evan Narcisse is an American writer, journalist, and narrative designer whose work spans comics, criticism, and video games. After graduating from New York University , he began his career as a culture and technology journalist, writing for outlets including  Time ,  Kotaku , and  The Atlantic , where he explored the intersection of race, identity, and storytelling in...

Ed Atkins is a British contemporary artist known for his haunting, hyperreal digital videos—works that combine computer-generated bodies, poetic monologues, and a profound sense of longing, absurdity, and decay. Since the early 2010s, his art has been exhibited at major institutions around the world, including Tate Britain and MoMA , and he’s taken part in various festivals, including the Venice B...

Tom Keegan is one of the leading performance directors in video games, whose career spans theatre, film, animation, and interactive entertainment. After starting out in the New York theatre scene, he worked in animation on  Johnny Bravo ,  The Powerpuff Girls , and  T he Woody Woodpecker Show , then moved into video games at a pivota...

Keza Macdonald is a Scottish journalist and editor who has spent more than two decades chronicling the culture and business of video games. She started early, as a junior staff writer for  GamesTM  while she was still a teenager. Then, after earning a degree in German and Japanese from the  University of Edinburgh —including a year studying in Japan—she became UK Games Editor at&nbs...

My guest today is a video game executive whose career spans the medium’s earliest home computers to the rise of the modern console business. He created his first games for the  Atari 800  in the early 1980s, before joining  Microsoft  in 1986, where he spent a decade as an early developer on  Excel  and  Word .  In 1996, he left the Office team to pursue his...

Prokop Jirsa is a Czech game designer whose work has helped redefine what historical realism can look like in a modern role-playing game. After completing his Master’s degree at the  Prague University of Economics and Business , he joined  Warhorse Studios  as a designer on  Kingdom Come: Deliverance .   There, he helped shape the game’s uncompromising approach to first-pe...

Dr. Elin Festøy is a Norwegian creative producer, researcher, and storyteller whose work uses interactive media to illuminate some of the most painful and overlooked histories of the 20th century. After completing a Master’s degree in 1995, she began her career as a journalist covering tech during the early emergence of digital culture. She later founded the transmedia studio&n...

Jon Ingold is a British game designer and writer whose work has helped redefine how narrative, choice, and player agency function in interactive storytelling. He began making parser-based text adventures and releasing them free on the internet. After studying mathematics at Cambridge University , he moved into professional game development at Sony PlayStation , where he worked as a designer in the...

Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with the reclusive game designer,  Phil Fish . Phil studied game design in Montreal and, after a brief stint working at Ubisoft, left to begin work on a game of his own, a platformer that combined the art style of the Super Nintendo classics of his youth, with perspective-shifting innovations of his own...

Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with comedian, writer and podcaster, Heather Anne Campbell. My guest today is an Emmy-nominated writer, sketch comedian, voice actor and performer. As a teenager she studied improv comedy at the famous ImprovOlympic studio in her home city of Chicago, training that prepared her for when she later starred on&...