pplpod

Type a 40-year-old sequence of keystrokes on a specific Bank of Canada web page about a commemorative 10 dollar bill and the site starts playing an 8-bit version of the national anthem while tiny banknotes rain down your screen. This episode explains how up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A got there. In 1985, Konami developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto was porting the arcade shooter Gradius...

Take a wrong step at the edge of a carefully curated virtual world and you find a digital ghost: a scrambled block of static that showers you with infinite riches while threatening to corrupt your save file. This episode unpacks MissingNo, the anomaly buried in the code of the 1996 release of Pokémon Red and Blue, drawing on game histories, sociological research, and vintage strategy guides. The h...

Think about who you were in 1997, then who you were in 2011. In that entire span, one studio was trapped inside a single project. This episode dissects Duke Nukem Forever, which held the Guinness World Record for the longest video game development cycle at 14 years and 44 days, as a psychological case study in what happens when creators get unlimited resources, zero deadlines, and an obsession wit...

It is May 1995 at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo. Sega has just announced the Saturn is launching that very day at 399 dollars. A Sony executive walks to the podium, says 299 dollars, and walks off. This episode uses that legendary mic drop as the entry point to a full history of the console wars, beginning with the 1983 crash caused by Atari's open ecosystem, where even Quaker Oats was d...

The man who got Tetris out of the Soviet Union and onto the Game Boy is now building simulated Mars habitats on a Hawaiian volcano and pushing states toward 100 percent renewable energy. This episode follows the nonlinear career of Henk Rogers, born in Amsterdam in 1953, educated at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and transplanted to Japan after marrying...

The Deus Ex franchise did not just iterate on a genre; it re-engineered how player choice works inside digital architecture. This episode traces the series' 20-plus-year legacy, starting with Warren Spector's original pitch, Troubleshooter, which fused Bruce Sterling's cyberpunk with the conspiratorial paranoia of 90s techno-thrillers. When John Romero's Ion Storm Austin handed Spector a blank che...

Street Fighter II generated over $10 billion in inflation-adjusted revenue, and its publisher still shuffled boss character names to avoid a likeness lawsuit from Mike Tyson. This episode traces the franchise from the 1987 original by Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto, with only Ryu and Ken playable and brutally strict joystick inputs, to the 1991 sequel by Akira Nishitani and Akira Yasuda t...

You slay a giant to save a girl, and instead of a fanfare you get wind and mournful strings. This episode examines Shadow of the Colossus, the 2005 PlayStation 2 release from director Fumito Ueda that stripped away towns, NPCs, side quests, minor enemies, and a minimap, leaving a young man named Wander, his horse Agro, and 16 colossi in the empty Forbidden Land. We explain how the emptiness works...

Sega is not a Japanese word. It stands for Service Games, a company that began in Honolulu in the 1940s supplying slot machines to US military bases before moving to Japan when the machines were outlawed in US territories. This episode follows the company's repeated reinventions: the 1960 dissolution after a US government investigation, the 1965 merger under Air Force officer David Rosen that crea...

In January 2001, brothers Andrew and Paul Gower launched a browser game from their family home in Nottingham, England. By 2026 the franchise had generated over $3 billion in lifetime revenue and 300 million accounts. This episode looks at how RuneScape's Java browser delivery and free tier reached players on library and school computers, how its classless, action-based progression and combat trian...

In 2020, roughly half of all children under 16 in the US were logging into a single virtual space. This episode traces Roblox from its 2004 origins as Dynablocks, a physics sandbox built by two engineers after their work on educational simulation software at Knowledge Revolution, through the pivot around 2008 to rely entirely on user-generated content written in a modified version of Lua. We look...

In 1980, Roberta Williams was packing floppy disks into Ziploc bags at her kitchen table and answering the phone to give players hints. Fifteen years later she was directing a 200-person team on a live-action horror game shipped on seven CD-ROMs. This episode covers the woman known as the queen of adventure games, from a shy childhood in rural Southern California and a COBOL programming job at Law...

Who owns a Soviet rover sitting on the moon, smuggled the ashes of Star Trek's Scotty onto the International Space Station, and coined the word avatar for a digital self? This episode traces the life of Richard Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who was told at 13 that his eyesight disqualified him from spaceflight and responded by building virtual worlds instead. We follow him from pr...

A 21-hour space battle that destroyed roughly $330,000 of real-world value. A corporate empire dismantled from the inside by a single director with the right permissions. A bank CEO who embezzled 200 billion ISK and used the proceeds for a house down payment. This episode explores EVE Online, launched in 2003 by Iceland's CCP Games, and how a space simulator set 21,000 years in the future in the s...

In August 1966, engineer Ralph H. Baer was waiting for a bus in New York City when an idea he had first pitched in 1951 came rushing back: let television viewers control what happens on the screen. This episode tells how Baer, then head of the equipment design division at defense contractor Sanders Associates, wrote a four-page proposal for Channel LP, commandeered an empty room, and secretly buil...

In the mid-1980s, Peter Molyneux was so sure his text-based business simulation would be a hit that he cut a bigger mail slot in his front door to handle the orders. He received two, one of them probably from his mother. This episode follows the strange path from that failure to a baked-bean export business called Taurus Impex, the Commodore mix-up that delivered ten free Amiga computers to the wr...

In the mid-1970s, Nolan Bushnell turned down a one-third stake in Apple for $50,000. He could afford to joke about it later because he had already built the arcade video game industry from scratch. This episode traces his story from managing midway games at Utah's Lagoon Amusement Park while studying engineering, to meeting Ted Dabney at Ampex, to the commercial failure of Computer Space that prod...

Neopets looked like the most innocent corner of the 1999 internet, a virtual pet site launched by two British university students from an office in Guildford, England. By Christmas 1999 it was serving 600,000 page views a day, and by January 2000 an American businessman and a group of investors had bought a majority stake and installed a management system based on the Church of Scientology's org b...

In 1990, SNK sold a home console for $649.99 with games priced around $200 each, and people bought it. This episode explores the Neo Geo, a platform whose name means New World in Greek and whose mission was to erase the gap between the arcade and the living room. We look at the broken 1980s arcade business, where operators had to buy 300-pound dedicated cabinets for every new game, and how Street...

Microsoft's marketing department hated the name Xbox so much they put it in focus groups only as a control variable to prove how bad it was, and it won. Employees called the project the coffin box because they thought it would end their careers. This episode traces how the original Xbox was born from Bill Gates' fear that Sony's PlayStation 2 would replace the Windows PC in the living room, and ho...

Mattel is known for Barbie, not for pioneering the first 16-bit home video game console or triggering an FTC investigation. This episode follows the Intellivision from its origins in Mattel's Blue Sky Group research division in the mid-1970s, through aerospace engineer David Chandler's partnership with General Instrument, to a 1980 nationwide launch at $275 that positioned the machine as a sophist...

Masahiro Sakurai created Kirby at 19 and directed Kirby's Dream Land in 1992, then went on to direct the first two Super Smash Bros. games before abruptly resigning from HAL Laboratory in 2003, frustrated by an industry that assumed every hit demanded a sequel. This episode traces his path from teenage prodigy to independent orchestrator: founding Sora Ltd. with his wife Michiko in 2005, designing...

The most famous nude code in gaming history was never real, but millions of people spent hours trying to unlock it, which proved just how obsessed the world was with Lara Croft. This episode follows the Tomb Raider franchise from Core Design in Derby, where Toby Gard swapped his protagonist's gender to avoid looking like an Indiana Jones knockoff, through Paul Douglas's custom 3D engine with true...

Hidden out of bounds in Doom II's final boss is a digitized severed head on a spike, and it belongs to John Romero. This episode charts the life of the designer who helped invent the first-person shooter, coined the term deathmatch, and then suffered one of the most public falls in tech history. We start with his parents driving a 1948 Chrysler to Colorado with $300, his Pac-Man epiphany in the ar...

At 14, John Carmack used a homemade mix of thermite and Vaseline to melt through a school window to steal Apple II computers, and served a year in juvenile detention. This episode traces how that relentless drive carried him from Softdisk and Commander Keen to co-founding id Software, where his adaptive tile refresh, ray casting, binary space partitioning, and surface caching techniques built the...