A Trip Down Memory Card Lane

In 1982, Pac-Man: The Animated Series became the first television show ever built around a video game character, arriving on ABC just months after federal deregulation opened the door for merchandise driven cartoons to...

In 2001, Nintendo released the GameCube , a console built almost entirely as a direct answer to everything that went wrong with the Nintendo 64. David, Rob, and friends trace the console's origins back to a collapsing...

In 2003, Valve quietly launched a piece of software that almost nobody noticed, and that same software would go on to define modern PC gaming. This week, David Kassin and guest host David Seley trace how Steam grew out...

In 1991, Civilization shipped from a company that barely wanted to publish it, the culmination of a promise Sid Meier had made to himself eleven years earlier, to write the ultimate strategy game. This week, David, Rob...

In 2009, Rocksteady Studios released Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game that would hold the Guinness World Record for most critically acclaimed superhero game ever. On today's episode, we trace how a small studio rising from...

In 1980, two college students at UC Santa Cruz set out to build a game that could surprise even the people who made it. Rogue spread across university computer systems without ever being sold, made its creators almost...

In 1981, IBM was the most dominant force in computing the world had ever seen, and the last company anyone expected to build a machine for the home. This week, we trace how a rejected 1979 business plan turned into the...

In 2003, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles brought the Final Fantasy name back to a Nintendo console for the first time in nearly a decade, and it did so by way of one of the strangest corners of Square's history. In...

In 1998, Namco released Soulcalibur , the sequel to its hit weapons based fighting game Soul Edge. In this episode, David and Rob trace why producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama refused to just call it Soul Edge 2, and how...

In 2010, Limbo arrived on Xbox Live Arcade as a silent, monochrome puzzle platformer built almost entirely on what it refused to explain. David and Rob trace creator Arnt Jensen's six year path from a solitary sketch of...

In 1985, Datasoft released Alternate Reality: The City , an Atari 8-bit role playing game built almost entirely by one self-taught programmer working out of a shack in the Hawaiian backwoods. In this episode, we explore...

In 1996, NiGHTS into Dreams asked players to fly through somebody else's dreams instead of walking through their own story, and it became one of the strangest, most singular experiences the Sega Saturn ever produced. In...

In 1990, a fifty-dollar plastic cartridge called the Game Genie arrived in North America and immediately became the most controversial accessory in gaming. David and Rob trace the story from a cold shoulder at a Las...

In 1996, id Software released Quake , one of the most influential games ever made, and one that nearly destroyed the team behind it. In this episode, David and Rob Kassin trace the full arc of how Quake came to be...

In 1969, Sesame Street premiered with a mission unlike anything children's television had attempted before, and thirteen years later, the Children's Television Workshop asked the same question on a new screen. In this...