Everybody's Talking At Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 123. Carlos Bordeu is the C in ACE Team, the studio behind Rock of Ages, Zeno Clash, The Deadly Tower of Monsters, SolSeraph, Abyss Odyssey, and most recently, The Eternal Cylinder. The studio’s projects are reliably-original-unto-earnestly-bizarre, going full-tilt at strange, wondrous ideas and preoccupations. They’re fascinating when the fail in places (Carlos’ … Continue reading "Behind the Cylinder, with Carlos Bordeu"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 122. Masao Kobayashi co-founded the indie studio Cut to Bits after about 15 years at Ubisoft, where he worked in a wide range of roles that often redounded to some form of project management and/or being a liaison between North American and Japanese teams and companies. That, and community management about as … Continue reading "What Else Game Devs Do, with Masao Kobayashi"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 121. The Mechanical World of Dr. Gearbox is first and foremost an attempt to rethink educational games, and specifically to rethink them into something that kids would actually want and choose to play. This is of course far from the first time that a game developer has attempted that lofty, elusive goal—so … Continue reading "A Changing World and How to Change It, with Mike Grieci"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 120. At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad, a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. “Wait, what?” you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely … Continue reading "(Chef)Squad Goals, with David Galindo"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 119. Aaron San Filippo is currently working on Whisker Squadron, a roguelike-alike riff on the arcadey corridor space-shooter genre (of which there are fewer examples than you might expect, given how large Star Fox looms). Before that, his studio Fippfly put out the similarly low-poly purist flight game Race the Sun, the … Continue reading "An Approachable Roguelike Full of Cats, with Aaron San Filippo"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 118. Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behind SkateBIRD. (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical … Continue reading "Trying Your Best and Helping Somehow, with Megan Fox"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 117. Laia Bee is one of the three co-founders of Pincer Games, who’ve debuted with the card-based brawler Fighters of Fate. She’s also deeply involved in the project of fostering a sense of community in the Uruguayan game development scene, and among South American game developers more broadly, and even more broadly … Continue reading "Pop Culture Belongs to Everyone, with Laia Bee"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 116. Don Bellenger stops by to talk about his upcoming “open-world gardenvania,” The Beauty Cult, as well as his cyberpunk roguelike-shooter-platformer (and nihilistic synthwave multi-media project) Black Future ’88. Along the way, we discuss the importance of game developers taking inspiration from things other than games, the joys of disengaging from monoculture, … Continue reading "A Better and Weirder World Than This One, with Don Bellenger"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 115. A Musical Story takes place in the mind of a musician, and it also takes place in an era when rock as a wide-open experimental space, and the album was the thing, and every album was in some sense a concept album. The game is likewise an experiment in telling a … Continue reading "This Sense of Freedom, with Charles Bardin"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 114. UNBEATABLE is a rhythm game, and an adventure game, and it’s serious about being fully both. More than that, it’s a game about the emotional truths of music, and of being in a band, and a piece of art about the connection between making art and doing crimes. In this episode, … Continue reading "Make Art, Do Crimes, with D-Cell Games"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 113. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a big heartfelt spectacle of a game—you’ve likely seen some of its dream-vibrant, mirror-polished visuals, and a bit of its cartoony gunplay—and as the game’s Lead Writer, Lauren Mee had a huge amount to do with the heartfelt part of that equation. Rift Apart is … Continue reading "Hope Too Is Rad, with Lauren Mee"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 112. Tali Faulkner (better known in internet circles as Veselekov) knew he had something timely on his hands when he made Umurangi Generation, but he couldn’t have known how timely. The base game was inspired by the fires in Australia in 2019, not the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—but with its themes of … Continue reading "How to See Everything Neoliberalism Ignores, with Tali Faulkner (a.k.a. Veselekov)"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 111. Amid the E3 madness, this crush of new games and games yet to be, we thought we’d take a moment and think a bit about games that are, in one way or another, not new. Let’s talk about games that we replay, and especially the ones that we keep revisiting at … Continue reading "On Replays, Remasters, and Remakes"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 110. Xalavier Nelson Jr. is an absurdly prolific artist and an inveterate collaborator, having left his creative stamp on Hypnospace Outlaw, We Are The Caretakers, Can Androids Pray, Mr. Bucket Told Me To, and so, so much else, from tabletop RPG systems to comics to games journalism. Currently he’s working on SkateBIRD … Continue reading "As Joyously and Explicitly as You Can, into the Fleshy Breach, with Xalavier Nelson Jr."

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 109. Yadu Rajiv does a whole lot of different things, all of them to do with games and the people and technologies that make them possible. By day, he’s a Lead Game Designer at BYJU’S, working on educational games that toe the line between physical and digital, and the rest of the … Continue reading "Making Space to Make Games, with Yadu Rajiv"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 108. Santago Zapata stops by to talk about the history of roguelikes, his own expansive body of small works for the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge, and his larger works, from Castlevania Roguelike, to Ananias, to his current project NovaMundi: The Spear of Chaquén. Is it a roguelike, this new game? The purist would say (and … Continue reading "An Accidental Genre, with Santiago Zapata (a.k.a. Slashie)"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 107. Jeremy Warmsley’s music has spanned pop (or more broadly, the whole touring band thing), film, television, radio, and recently, games. He’s an inventive, thoughtful, ever-expressive voice wherever he shows up (including on podcasts, as it happens). Here we mostly talk about his game soundtracking work on Russell’s Quinn’s Linda & Joan, … Continue reading "The Mayonnaise Allegory, with Jeremy Warmsley"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 106. Russell Quinn has had a unique career as a technologist enabling stories, building the underlying systems for the ahead-of-its time McSweeney’s app, as well as for the equally-ahead-of-theirs, novel-adjacent multimedia projects The Silent History and The Pickle Index. He’s brought remarkably inventive and playful stories to the world, though not as … Continue reading "The Futures of Stories, with Russell Quinn"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 105. Chevy Ray has been making games for a long time now—though most of them are currently tough to play; RIP Flash—but is probably best known for Ikenfell, a tactical RPG about going to magic school, working through difficult relationships, and petting a great many cats. Here Chevy talks about what it … Continue reading "A Nuanced Critique of Subtlety, with Chevy Ray"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 104. Anisa Sanusi is an accomplished UI/UX designer, probably best known for her work on Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster—two utterly different games that bring with them utterly different challenges in terms of usability, accessibility, tone, and scope. She’s also the founder of the Limit Break mentorship program, an organization dedicated to … Continue reading "Designing for Empathy, with Anisa Sanusi"