My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

My guest today is Tetsuya Mizucguchi, the Japanese designer of some of the most transcendent music-themed video games yet made. He graduated with a degree in media aesthetics from Nihon University, then, inspired by a photograph of a virtual reality headset made by NASA, joined Sega hoping to work on a similar project. A keen sports car enthusiast, he developed the arcade racing game Sega Rally Ch...

My guest today is Iain Cook, a Scottish musician, producer, and pop star. In 2003, while studying at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, he met Martin Doherty, who asked my guest to produce a record for his band. The two remained friends, and later played together in the post rock group Aereogramme . In 2007, after Aereogramme disbanded, my guest bought himself an analogue synthaser. Four y...

My guest today is Ellie Gibson, an award--winning journalist, presenter, and one half of the comedy double act Scummy Mummies . Born in South London, my guest joined Sony in 2001 and there wrote the manuals for first-party PlayStation games. She moved into journalism, covering games for a variety of publications, including Eurogamer, The Guardian, Metro, and Vice . In 2013 she met aspiring comic H...

My guest today is the Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist Ronan Farrow. Born in New York City he earned his degree in philosophy at just fifteen. While a teenager he served as a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth, advocating for children and women caught up in the Darfur crisis in Sudan. In 2009, at 22 years old, he became a special advisor to the Obama administration, then a Rhode...

My guest today is Dan Vecchitto, the American creator of one of 2022’s funniest games. In Trombone Champ , you play as a trombonist and must blast your way through a setlist of classical pieces, national anthems, and traditional songs in a brilliant and riotously silly reinterpretation of Guitar Hero . After a journalist for PC Gamer posted a video of himself ruining Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in...

My guest today is the legendary British video game designer, Charles Cecil. While a student at Manchester University, a friend invited him to write a text adventure which led him to work for the video game publishers US Gold and, later, Activision. In 1990 he co-founded Revolution Software in the North of England. After releasing Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky , he began work on Bro...

My guest today is Grace Curtis, a video game critic and one of the most exciting new voices in science fiction writing. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, she graduated from the UEA with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing in 2019. Since then, she has worked as a freelance critic, contributing to Edge magazine and Eurogamer , and with the game publisher Future Friends , part of the team t...

My guest today is Erik Wolpaw, the American writer for some of the funniest video games yet made. In the nineties he and a friend founded the website Old Man Murray , a satirical online publication that poked fun at video gaming’s sacred cows, and established a tone still prevalent across the internet today. The site was read by Gabe Newell, creator of Half-Life , who later hired both writers. At...

My guest today is the English fantasy author and champion of the video game industry, Sir Ian Livingstone. In 1975, while in his mid-twenties, he founded a boardgame company, Games Workshop , which soon caught the attention of the American creators of a new tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons . My guest brokered a deal to sell D&D in the UK as a mail order company, and in 1977 opened the compa...

My guest today is the Scottish comedian, television presenter and writer, Susan Calman. While studying law at the University of Glasgow , she spent three months in North Carolina working with criminals on death row. After she graduated, she became a corporate lawyer, and soon started performing as a stand-up in the evenings. After seven years, she left the legal profession behind to become a...

My guest today is the Dutch video game designer and entrepreneur, Henk Rogers. While a student at the University of Hawaii, he’d while away the hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends. After he moved to Japan, he bought a computer and used it to develop a role-playing game of his own, called Black Onyx , tailored to the Japanese market. When the game’s backer pulled out of the deal, he...

My guest today is the American designer of some of the finest strategy video games yet made. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Computer Science in 2000, he accepted a job to become a business consultant. Before he arrived for work, however, he saw an advertisement for position at Fireaxis, the development studio founded by the legendary designer, Sid Meier, which he...

My guest today is the British-Malaysian stand-up comedian and comedy writer Phil Wang. Born in the UK, when he was one week old his parents moved to Malaysia, where he attended school until the age of sixteen. The family then returned to England, moving to Bath in Somerset, which my guest once described as “a spa town for people who find Cheltenham too ethnic'. While studying Engineering at King’s...

Shahid Ahmad was a schoolboy living on a London council estate when he sold his prized BMX bike to raise money for programming books and taught himself to write computer games. After several knock-backs, in 1983, at the age of seventeen, he sold a game for £300 to a commercial publisher. He soon made a name for himself in the emerging Britsoft scene, programming the Commodore 64 version of Jet Set...

My guest today is the reclusive designer of one of the greatest video games yet made. He 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. Six years in the making, Fez launched in 2012 to near uni...

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 Whose Line Is It Anyway and the sketch comedy show Key and Peele . She has worked on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live , The Twilight Zone and,...

My guest today is the American co-creator of one of the longest-running and most popular independent games yet made. In high school he and his older brother Zach designed adventure games based on fantasy and science fiction stories they invented together. He taught himself computer programming and received fifteen offers to enrol in PhD math programs. At Stanford University, he and his brother con...

My guest today is a stand-up comedian, television presenter and Irish national treasure. He studied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at University College, Dublin, where during a debate, he cracked a joke, made the audience laugh, and forever doomed himself to chasing that high. Since then, he has toured the world as a comic, as well as becoming a prolific television host: he has chaired Mock t...

[Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of addiction to prescription pain medication and fatal overdose.] My guest today is an American writer and performer who stars in Apple TV’s Mythic Quest series, and who has, in recent years, voiced some of video gaming’s best-loved characters. She grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and rose to prominence via the web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’ , in...

My guest today is a software engineer who, in 2021, released a word game that soon became a global obsession. He grew up in a Welsh farming village, attended the Royal Holloway University, then moved to North America to study for a Masters. In 2011, after graduating, he joined the staff of the website Reddit, where he began to design experimental games such as The Button , Place and, in his spare...

Welcome to My Perfect Console with author, New Yorker journalist and The Observer's video game critic, Simon Parkin. Each week a guest picks the five video games they would like to immortalise on their very own fictional games console. Trailer episode featuring clips from forthcoming episodes with Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, and Charles Cecil MBE, co-founder of Revolution Software, creator...