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In May 1995, a Sony executive walked to a microphone, said $299, and walked off, undercutting Sega's $399 Saturn and cementing a brand-new trade show as the industry's kingmaker. This episode tells the biography of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, beginning with the indignity of CES in 1991, when gaming booths were shoved behind adult film vendors in an overflow tent whose leaking roof dripped r...

Hironobu Sakaguchi wanted to be a musician. He nearly got expelled from high school for selling bootleg concert tickets, and he joined a brand-new startup called Square in 1983 mainly to afford software for a counterfeit Apple II he bought in Akihabara. This episode traces how a friend's copy of Wizardry rewired his artistic brain, how he rose to Director of Planning and Development by 1986 while...

The legend says an unnamed black arcade cabinet appeared in Portland, Oregon in 1981, induced seizures, amnesia and night terrors, and was serviced by men in black suits harvesting data for a CIA mind control experiment. The publisher was supposedly called Sinneslöschen. None of it happened. This episode traces the Polybius hoax to a coinop.org entry uploaded around 2000 and backdated to 1998, the...

On Tuesday, December 16, 1997 at 6:51 PM, roughly 4.6 million Japanese households watching episode 38 of Pokemon, Dennou Senshi Porygon, saw Pikachu's thunderbolt trigger a red and blue strobe flickering at 12 hertz for four seconds. Within hours, 685 viewers had been taken to hospitals by ambulance, 208 required hospital care, and three arrived unconscious. This episode dissects the animation tec...

Masahiro Sakurai built the best-selling fighting game franchise in history partly because he found fighting games too inaccessible. This episode traces his journey from HAL Laboratory in 1996, when he pitched both a stealth game and a chaotic four-player brawler, to the prototype called Dragon King that Satoru Iwata programmed on weekends while managing other projects. We explain how Sakurai repla...

In 1980, Atari coin-op president Gene Lipkin tore a photo of a radar screen out of a magazine and told his team to build a game that looked like it. The assignment landed on junior programmer Dave Theurer, fresh off Atari Soccer, with six months and almost no help. This episode follows those six months, from the original brief to defend six real California cities from Soviet missiles to the recurr...

Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man, one of the most recognizable pieces of intellectual property in history, and received no bonus, no royalties and no equity, just his standard Namco salary. This episode explores the outsider who made it possible: an engineering graduate from Tokai University who could not code, had no art training, and filled his textbooks with manga doodles that became the foundation...

In 1990, a group of programmers moonlighting at Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana replicated the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 on a PC using John Carmack's adaptive tile refresh trick, sent it to Nintendo, and were politely rejected. That rejection birthed id Software. This episode follows John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall and Adrian Carmack from borrowed company computers and Scott Miller'...

In February 2014, a 28-year-old programmer in Vietnam was earning an estimated $50,000 a day from banner ads in a game he built in two or three days. Then Dong Nguyen tweeted that he could not take it anymore and pulled Flappy Bird from every app store. This episode reconstructs his life, from learning to code by studying Super Mario Bros. and interning at Punch Entertainment at 19, to founding .G...

Chris Sawyer, an elusive Scottish programmer, built one of the most iconic management simulations in history almost entirely alone, writing about 99 percent of RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language. This episode traces his path from Virus, Xenomorph and the Frontier ports through Transport Tycoon in 1994 to the 1999 release of RollerCoaster Tycoon, and explains why coding so close to the b...

Jack Thompson once pasted a caped crusader over his own driver's license, photocopied it, and mailed it to judges and opposing lawyers to prove he was a real-life crime fighter. This episode charts the rise and fall of the Florida attorney who spent two decades waging war on rap music, MTV and violent video games, only to be permanently disbarred in 2008 and, in a 2024 interview, praise games as a...

Baldur's Gate 3 opens with a mind flayer implanting a parasitic tadpole in your brain, and it only gets more ambitious from there. This episode explores how Larian Studios, a privately owned Belgian developer once told it lacked the budget and experience to handle the license, adapted the fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons rules into a digital chemistry set with virtual D20 rolls, advantage and di...

The Commodore 64 was rushed together by exhausted MOS Technology engineers over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays of 1981, crammed into an old VIC-20 case, and shown at CES in January 1982 with a $595 price tag that left Atari executives stunned. This episode explains how CEO Jack Tramiel's demand for 64 kilobytes of RAM, at a time when the memory alone cost over $100 retail, was made possib...

In 2010, Rockstar San Diego released a Western with a development and marketing budget estimated at $80 to $100 million, a figure analysts said would require four million copies just to break even. Instead, Red Dead Redemption sold five million in three weeks, went on to ship over 25 million copies, and fundamentally changed how open-world games tell stories. This episode explores the twilight fro...

In December 2004, a trip to Thailand left independent developer Jonathan Blow with an idea he believed in so deeply it terrified him. Frustrated with a games industry he saw as churning out dopamine-drip skinner boxes, he sank roughly $200,000 of his own savings into a 2D puzzle platformer, paying his own living expenses and artist David Hellman over three years with no publisher, no board and no...

Pitch a game to 1980s executives with no boss fights, no high scores, no end state, and no way to win or lose, and you sound like you are trying to bankrupt a studio. Yet that pitch created a genre and shaped how a generation of politicians, planners, and architects see cities. This episode unpacks the history, mathematical controversies, and corporate downfall of SimCity, beginning in 1985 when W...

On September 9, 1999, a console pulled in 98.4 million dollars in 24 hours, predicted the online future, solved controller drift, and beat the PlayStation 2 to market. Eighteen months later it took its company out of the hardware business forever. This episode explains the paradox of the Sega Dreamcast by starting with the trauma of the Saturn: a dual-CPU architecture that forced developers to han...

An out-of-work engineer in Redmond, Washington buys a Donkey Kong cabinet for his garage and tries to beat a decades-old record. Instead he walks into a bureaucratic conspiracy. This episode synthesizes forensic reports from a 2018 investigation, gaming history articles, and documentary archives to follow Steve Wiebe, who dissected the 1981 arcade game like a structural stress test, manipulating i...

The foundational code for the adventure game genre was not written in a corporate lab. It was written in the 1970s by a divorced dad trying to connect with his two young daughters. This episode explores Will Crowther, an ARPANET engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman by day and a hardcore caver with the Cave Research Foundation the rest of the time, who with his wife Patricia turned muddy survey note...

Drive a virtual bus from Tucson to Las Vegas at 45 miles per hour on an empty, unchanging desert highway for eight real-time hours. You cannot pause. The bus veers slightly right, so taping down the controller strands you in the sand and summons a tow truck that also drives in real time. Your reward is one point. This episode traces the wildest life cycle of any piece of media the hosts have encou...

In late-1970s Japan, an urban legend claimed the 100 yen coin was vanishing from circulation because every one of them had been swallowed by Space Invaders. It was a myth, but the fact that people believed it captures the frenzy this episode explores: the brief window from 1978 to 1983 when arcade games rewired global pop culture and accelerated computing. In 1982 alone the US arcade industry pull...

In 1979 Ken Williams brought home a teletype terminal to write business software. His wife Roberta found Colossal Cave Adventure on it, got hooked, and wondered why a computer capable of graphics was only showing words. This episode traces how that distraction became Sierra On-Line, from Mystery House in May 1980, the first computer adventure game with graphics, traced with a VersaWriter tablet an...

In the mid-1980s Nintendo claimed its Famicom was impossible to reverse-engineer without proprietary documentation. British brothers Tim and Chris Stamper stripped the casings off its chips, mapped the circuitry by eye, cracked it, flew to Nintendo of America, and dropped working tech demos on the president's desk. Instead of a lawsuit, they got a virtually unlimited budget. This episode treats Ra...

In August 1997, during the Ultima Online beta test, a random player assassinated Lord British, the supposedly invincible in-game alter ego of creator Richard Garriott, in front of a crowd. This episode uses that moment, and the Lord British Postulate it inspired, to trace Garriott's evolution from a teenage dungeon master with a stiff way of saying hello to a philosophical pioneer of morality in d...

Imagine creating the highest-grossing entertainment product of your era, being contractually forbidden from taking credit, and being bad at playing it yourself. This episode explores the life and mind of Tomohiro Nishikado, the lone-wolf Taito designer behind Space Invaders. Working in a 1970s arcade landscape dominated by pinball and literal sports simulations, Nishikado wanted to capture the mou...