pplpod

The Nintendo Wii was built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, mocked for its name, and outclassed on raw power by every rival, yet it sold more than 101 million units and later found a second life in stroke and Parkinson's rehabilitation clinics. This episode unpacks how Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Genyo Takeda abandoned the graphics arms race against the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and pursue...

In 1983, American retailers treated home video games as a dead fad buried in a New Mexico landfill. This episode explains how Nintendo, a former playing card company, resurrected the industry with the Famicom and the NES. We follow Hiroshi Yamauchi's demand for a sub-9,800-yen console with a hidden expansion port, Masayuki Uemura's work with Ricoh to sidestep Commodore's 6502 patent by severing th...

Rand and Robyn Miller were living on rice, beans, and government cheese when Activision told them to stick to children's software. This episode follows how the brothers behind The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, backed by Japanese publisher Sunsoft, built Myst, a 1993 puzzle game with no inventory, no enemies, no deaths, and no timer, drawing on Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and a design philosophy...

Mortal Kombat was never supposed to exist. In 1991, a four-man Midway team in Chicago, Ed Boon, John Tobias, John Vogel, and Dan Forden, was assigned a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie tie-in; when the deal collapsed, they spoofed the actor as Johnny Cage, mined Chinese mythology and bootleg Hong Kong fantasy films for lore, and positioned themselves as the gritty anti-Street Fighter. This episode cove...

In the late 1980s, adventure games punished curiosity with instant death, and Ron Gilbert at Lucasfilm Games thought that was lazy design. This episode follows how his pirate short-story concept, inspired by Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides and a childhood wish to step off the boat on Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride, became The Secret of Monkey Island, a game where the only way to di...

A one-million-dollar gamble on a plastic Gibson SG controller became a billion-dollar empire and then a cautionary tale about market saturation. This episode traces Guitar Hero from its 2005 origins, when hardware maker RedOctane partnered with rhythm-game developer Harmonix to bring the Guitar Freaks arcade experience to Western living rooms, and explains why the illusion of mastery, a five-butto...

Mario Kart started in 1992 as a workaround: the Super Nintendo could not render a two-player split-screen version of F-Zero at full speed, so Shigeru Miyamoto's team shrank the tracks, slowed the vehicles, swapped hover cars for go-karts, and added items to keep low-speed racing exciting. This episode traces how that compromise produced dynamic difficulty balancing, better known as rubber banding,...

Celeste began as Everest, a tiny prototype that Maddie Thorson and programmer Noel Berry built on the PICO-8 fantasy console during a weekend game jam in August 2015. This episode follows how that pixelated bouldering game, inspired by Super Mario Bros. 3 and the finite grip strength of real climbing, grew into the 2018 hit that won Game for Impact at The Game Awards and sold 1.7 million copies by...

In 1962, a group of MIT programmers turned a 120,000-dollar PDP-1 the size of three refrigerators into a two-player space dogfight, and in the process laid the groundwork for the modern video game industry. This episode follows Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen of the self-styled Hingham Institute as they drew on the Lensman novels and Japanese tokusatsu films to stress-test the fir...

A locked digital box, a virtual slot machine, and a saved credit card: that simple mechanic triggered stock crashes, drew the fury of the Walt Disney Company, and dragged lawmakers into the video game industry. This episode traces loot boxes from the 2004 Gachapon tickets in MapleStory and the 2007 free-to-play pivot of China's ZT Online, which reportedly earned upwards of 15 million dollars a mon...

Kerbal Space Program began with a teenager strapping tin figurines to backyard fireworks and grew into one of the most respected spaceflight simulators ever made. This episode traces how a games director named Felipe, working at a Mexican marketing agency called Squad, pitched a physics-heavy rocket game to his bosses in 2010, shipped a bare-bones alpha in June 2011 with no stability assist and a...

Lemmings sold 55,000 copies on its first day in February 1991 and went on to an estimated 20 million, yet it began as an 8x8 pixel Deluxe Paint doodle Mike Dailly made for a different DMA Design game called Walker. This episode explains how Russell Kay saw a game in that endless walking animation, named it after the rodent myth, and how the studio in Dundee built a puzzle around blind forward mome...

Punch-Out!! did not start with a love of boxing but with a warehouse full of unsold Donkey Kong arcade monitors in 1984. This episode explains how Genyo Takeda and Nintendo R&D3 were told to build a game requiring two stacked screens, how that tall narrow view forced the over-the-shoulder camera and wireframe fighter, and why the result is better understood as a rhythm puzzle in boxing gloves...

In 2012 thatgamecompany released Journey, a game with no combat, no death, no dialogue and no text, and it earned a historic Grammy nomination while bankrupting the studio. This episode looks at director Jenova Chen's Japanese garden approach, pruning every non-essential mechanic until a red-robed traveler, a musical chime, a magical scarf and a distant mountain were all that remained. The hosts e...

In 2004 Rockstar Games shoved an explicit minigame into a locked digital closet and shipped Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas anyway. This episode explains how Sam Houser's ambition for adult content ran into warnings from executives Jennifer Kolbe and Terry Donovan that an Adults Only rating would be a retail death sentence, and why, weeks from manufacturing, the team severed the control pointers ins...

In 1964, while Tokyo celebrated the Olympics, Nintendo's stock had collapsed to 60 yen because adults had abandoned card games for bowling alleys and pachinko, and the Disney-licensed children's cards had saturated their market. This episode profiles Hiroshi Yamauchi, who took over the family Hanafuda business in 1950 at age 23 after his father abandoned the family and his grandfather suffered a s...

Half-Life locked the camera behind your eyes for its entire runtime, with no cutscenes and a protagonist who never speaks. This episode traces how former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington founded Valve in 1996, licensed the Quake engine and rewrote roughly 75 percent of it into GoldSrc, drew on Stephen King's The Mist and the manga Akira, and then hit a wall in late 1997 when pla...

Valve gave the Half-Life 2 team 40 million dollars and no deadline in 1999, along with Gabe Newell's expectation that anything short of the best PC game of all time would bum everyone out. This episode follows the decision to build the Source engine at the same time as the game, the move from Black Mesa to Viktor Antonov's Eastern European City 17, and Ken Birdwell's study of psychologist Paul Ekm...

Grim Fandango scored 94 on Metacritic, won Game of the Year awards, and now sits in the Museum of Modern Art, yet it was blamed for killing the adventure game genre. This episode explores the Eighth Underworld, where Manny Calavera works off a debt at the Department of Death selling travel packages to the newly deceased, and how Tim Schafer fused a UC Berkeley anthropology lesson on Aztec burial b...

In 1997 the creators of Grand Theft Auto hired publicist Max Clifford to plant negative tabloid stories about their own game, and the manufactured outrage worked. This episode follows the franchise from DMA Design's top-down 2D original through the 3D revolution of GTA III in 2001 and into the HD universe, explaining how each graphical era functions as a hard narrative reboot that freed Rockstar f...

The Game Genie looked like magic to kids in the early 1990s, but it was a hardware hack that ended up shaping copyright law. This episode starts with Codemasters founder David Darling being turned away by Nintendo at CES, the company reverse engineering the 10NES lockout chip to ship Treasure Island Dizzy with a physical lives dial, and toy distributor Lewis Galoob's son being mesmerized by a Mari...

In 1987 Hironobu Sakaguchi promised himself that if his new fantasy RPG flopped he would quit the industry and go back to university, and Square was barely keeping the lights on. This episode explains how that mood, plus a need for a catchy title abbreviating to FF after Fighting Fantasy was already trademarked, produced the name Final Fantasy, and how an unexpected hit with a completely closed en...

At its peak in March 2010, FarmVille had over 83 million monthly active users begging friends to water virtual strawberries. This episode traces how a four-person team from the University of Illinois pitched Zynga a Sims-like browser game and shipped FarmVille in about five weeks in June 2009, with a plow-plant-wait-harvest loop simple enough that anyone who could click a mouse could play. The hos...

Elden Ring takes most players well over 100 hours, yet speedrunners using a metronome-timed zip glitch can finish it in under five minutes. This episode explores how FromSoftware and director Hidetaka Miyazaki blew the punishing Dark Souls formula out into the open-world Lands Between, dropping players in Limgrave with a spectral steed named Torrent, no quest markers, and a rune economy where dyin...

Dragon Quest III sold 1.1 million copies in a single day in Japan, hundreds of schoolchildren were reportedly arrested for skipping class to buy it, and Enix voluntarily moved future releases to Saturdays. This episode traces the franchise back to a 1982 Enix programming contest that sent Yuji Horii to AppleFest 83 in San Francisco, where he discovered Wizardry and Ultima and set out to bring stat...