pplpod

In May 2021, a single chicken nugget from the BTS meal sold on eBay for $99,997 because it looked like a crewmate from Among Us. This episode explains how a game that launched in June 2018 to 30 to 50 concurrent players became a global obsession. We break down the rules: crewmates completing mundane tasks on maps like the Skeld and Polus while up to three impostors kill, sabotage, vent, and lie th...

In 1993, politicians accused the Sega CD game Night Trap of teaching children to hunt women, and the obscure title sold 50,000 copies in a single week. The player's actual goal was to save the women from vampires. This episode revisits the 1993 and 1994 US Senate hearings on video games, when a $6 billion industry still sold in the toy aisle collided with record gun homicides, a national panic abo...

Warren Robinett's 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure generated $25 million for the company while he earned a $22,000 salary, no royalties, and no credit on the box. This episode traces how a UC Berkeley student who learned C from Ken Thompson played Colossal Cave Adventure at the Stanford AI lab and decided to translate a text game that used hundreds of kilobytes into a 4 kilobyte cartridge with 128 b...

In February 2014, more than six and a half million people watched tens of thousands of strangers type commands into a chat box to steer a Pokemon Red character into walls. Twitch Plays Pokemon opens this biography of a platform. We trace Twitch from Justin.tv, launched in 2007 by Yale graduates Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, through the June 2011 gaming spinoff, 45 million unique viewers by October...

In 1994, publishers told David Brevik that role-playing games were dead. This episode traces how his slow, turn-based, claymation dungeon crawler pitched by Condor Games at the Consumer Electronics Show became Diablo, the Blizzard North classic that birthed the action RPG. We cover the chance meeting with Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham over shared misery porting Justice League Task Force, and the...

In 1980, a young Will Wright helped drive a modified Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn to Santa Monica in just over 33 and a half hours to win the illegal US Express street race. The same man went on to create SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, games famous for having no finish line at all. This episode traces how a Montessori education, the loss of his father at age nine, a fascination with Go and tabletop war...

In 2000, a video game with a rumored $30 million budget, helmed by the co-creator of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, sold barely 40,000 copies in its first months. This episode traces the complete history of Daikatana, from John Romero's departure to found Ion Storm with a $13 million advance from Eidos Interactive, through the 400-page design document spanning four time periods, the fatal mid-de...

When Hello Games founder Sean Murray released his sci-fi universe in August 2016, his reward was bomb threats, death threats, and phone calls with Scotland Yard. This episode traces how a team that started with four people and grew to about a dozen, inspired by the vibrant cover art of 1970s and 1980s science fiction paperbacks, built a deterministic procedural generation engine capable of 18 quin...

The savior of the video game industry was a slow, finicky plastic robot. This episode gives R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, a proper biography, starting with the North American video game crash of 1983, when shovelware from companies outside the industry drove revenues down nearly 97 percent and made the words video game toxic to toy retailers. It explains how Nintendo's computer-with-keyboar...

The father of home video games was not a garage hacker in 1970s California. He was Ralph Baer, a Jewish teenager who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, worked in a New York factory for $12 a week, and taught himself electronics through a correspondence course he spotted at a bus stop. This episode follows his path through Army military intelligence in London, an 18-ton collection of foreign weaponry he do...

The man who built the modern video game industry almost never picked up a controller. This episode profiles Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's third president, from a Kyoto childhood marked by his father's abandonment and wartime factory work, to taking over the family hanafuda card company at 21 on the condition that he be the only family member employed there, firing a cousin and then the striking vet...

Fortnite began as a 2011 internal game jam idea at Epic Games after Gears of War 3, then limped through six years of development, an engine swap from Unreal Engine 3 to 4, an art-style overhaul and executive shakeups after Tencent bought a large stake. This episode follows the troubled cooperative zombie game Save the World to its July 2017 early-access launch, and the two-month pivot that followe...

A medieval executioner with two broken arms bites off the limbs of the condemned; a farmer accidentally plants his bed in a field. Nobody scripted these moments. They emerged from Dwarf Fortress, the simulation Tarn Adams and his brother Zach have built for over two decades. This episode follows Tarn from a BASIC game called Dragslay and self-taught C in high school, through the abandoned 3D proje...

What dollar amount makes a creator want to walk away from his own creation? For Markus Persson, known as Notch, it was $2.5 billion. This episode follows Minecraft from Persson's after-hours prototypes while working at King, the isometric base-building experiment RubyDung that he almost abandoned for looking too blocky, and the moment Infiniminer convinced him uniform cubes were a technical shortc...

Robert Kurvitz failed as a musician, published a novel that sold around a thousand copies, and spent three years in alcoholism and depression. Then he turned that experience into Disco Elysium, a 2019 role-playing game that has sold over five million copies. This episode traces the Estonian creator's path from a rock band and a world-building idea sparked while listening to trance music, through y...

In May 1997 Garry Kasparov paced and sweated on a global stage after a chess computer made a move so strange he assumed it saw something beyond human comprehension. It was a bug. This episode treats IBM's Deep Blue as a biographical subject, from a Carnegie Mellon doctoral project called ChipTest in 1985, through Deep Thought's 1989 defeat by Kasparov, to IBM's mandate to build a machine that coul...

A drunken cosmic king destroys every star in the sky and sends his five-centimeter-tall son to Earth with a sticky ball to rebuild the universe. This episode tells the story of Keita Takahashi, the Musashino Art University sculpture student who joined Namco as a visual artist in 1999, had a pitch about hammer-headed drivers steering pedestrians rejected, and then synthesized an unreleased Sony pro...

In September 2005 the capital cities of World of Warcraft filled with bones as a spell called Corrupted Blood escaped a raid dungeon and killed thousands of characters in seconds. This episode explains how the debuff from the boss Hakkar was meant to stay inside Zul'Gurub, how dismissed hunter and warlock pets froze the timer and carried the disease into crowded marketplaces, and how invincible NP...

In August 1972 a strange wooden cabinet in a Sunnyvale bar stopped working, and the engineer who opened it found the coin mechanism jammed with quarters. This episode traces the history of Pong from Nolan Bushnell's fake General Electric contract, a training exercise handed to new Atari hire Alan Alcorn, through the hardwired logic Alcorn built into a $75 television, the ball that sped up during r...

In 1995 Nintendo asked players to press their faces into a heavy tabletop periscope and stare at glowing red lines while mirrors hummed against their noses. The Virtual Boy sold about 770,000 units and was discontinued in Japan within six months. This episode follows the hardware from its origins at a Massachusetts company called Reflection Technology, whose scanned linear array display Sega passe...

Cyberpunk 2077 cost roughly $440 million to make, turned a profit on 8 million pre-orders before launch day, and then shipped so broken that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store for six months. This episode maps the making, breaking and redemption of CD Projekt Red's 2020 game, starting with Mike Pondsmith's 1980s tabletop lore, the alternate history behind Night City, and the design choices...

A free mobile game about swiping colored sweets has generated over $20 billion in lifetime revenue. This episode unpacks how developer King turned a disposable three-minute browser score-attack game into Candy Crush Saga, starting with the threat of Zynga's Farmville, the rapid prototyping that produced Bubble Witch Saga, and the saga model that chopped gameplay into short map-based levels players...

Duck Hunt looked like a simple shooting gallery, but the 1984 Nintendo classic hid a second player secretly steering the duck, a kill screen at round 99 and a dog you were never allowed to shoot. This episode traces the game's roots back to a 1976 Beam Gun toy designed by Gunpei Yokoi, explains his philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology, and looks at what Shigeru Miyamoto and comp...

Before cybersecurity was a buzzword, programmers were already hiding jokes, protests and signatures inside the machines they built. This episode traces the history of digital Easter eggs from a 1960s government mainframe that spat out an anti-war slogan, to Warren Robinette burning his name into a secret room in Atari's Adventure after the company refused to credit its programmers, to the moment a...

In 1989, Nintendo's marketing promised kids a cyborg gauntlet straight out of RoboCop that would let them reach into the television. The Power Glove sold nearly a million units on that promise and was, functionally, a nightmare. This episode reveals that Nintendo did not design it at all: the concept came from Grant Goddard and Samuel Cooper Davis at Abrams Gentile Entertainment, it was manufactur...