Everybody's Talking At Once

ETAO Podcast, Episode 103. Chris King of Batterystaple Games shares a chunk of his time to discuss 30XX, the reimagined, souped-up sequel to the Mega Man X-esque roguelike-alike 20XX. We get pretty far into the weeds as far as the differences between the two games, the double-edged beam-sword of encouraging player-created content from day one, … Continue reading "Rogue Chunks, with Chris King"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 102. Our America puts you in the shoes of a Black father driving his son to school—and if that doesn’t sound potentially harrowing to you, then you might be exactly the project’s intended audience. It’s a work that means to illuminate, instruct, challenge, and speak simple, difficult truths. In this interview, Bryant … Continue reading "Experiencing America, with Bryant Young"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 101. You might know Chel Wong from her rightly-celebrated, highly modular soundtrack to Kine, and some more people are about to know her from Watch This Space. But you definitely already know her if you’re even tangentially involved in the Boston-area indie scene (or for that matter, the New England Smash scene). … Continue reading "Communities and Modularities, with Chel Wong"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 100. For our hundredth episode, we’re trying something a little different and editing together some of our favorite moments from the past year of the ‘cast. If you’ve been looking to catch up but haven’t had the time to dive into entire longform interviews, then this should provide a good place to … Continue reading "What We Heard and What We Learned in 2020"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 99. 2020, everybody. It was a weird year for lots of things, we think it’s fair to say—including but by no means limited to games. So in this episode, we take a moment to recap the games we played this year, the games currently glistening atop (or languishing deep within) our to-read … Continue reading "What We Played (and What We Didn’t) in 2020"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 98. Like Eliza before it, Möbius Front ’83 is a Zachtornics game that longtime Zachtronics fans probably didn’t expect—though also like Eliza, it has more than a few themes in common with the rest of the catalog, and beyond that, Möbius Front ’83 adheres to Zach-like conventions more closely than you might … Continue reading "The Work of War, with Zach Barth"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 97. The PlayStation 5 is out, as is the Xbox Series X and Series S Series! That’s exciting, at least for those of us who can get our hands on them. Drew’s been PS5ing, and he and Lucio both built new PCs this year, so now seemed like a fairly ideal time … Continue reading "The Latest Generation"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 96. After a decade working on the Assassin’s Creed games, Nick Guérin joined Thunder Lotus Games as the Creative Director on Spiritfarer, a farming and management sim about death, kindness, labor, wants, needs, and all manner of other things that Assassin’s Creed (venerable though it is) rarely finds the space to explore. … Continue reading "This Kindness unto Death, with Nick Guérin"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 95. Brian Handy stops by to discuss Wild Honesty, his game of, well, wild honesty. Just how do you design an experience of radical openness and ever-expanding intimacy? How do you then adapt that networked play, with all its extra layers of isolation and all the kinds of human connection it lack … Continue reading "Art, Honestly, with Brian Handy"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 94. Oskar Stålberg builds little town dioramas, as he puts it—or more exactly, he builds the procedural generation tools that allow him, and his algorithms, and you the player to build little town dioramas together. You could call this an extension of his work on the “megamap” in The Division, and certainly … Continue reading "Math and Art, with Oskar Stålberg"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 93. Nils Deneken has been working on Mutazione in one way or another since 2008. (You might have heard 2009, but in this interview, we set that particular misconception straight!) Through more than a decade of reinvention and revision, the game has retained its core of ensemble-cast intimacy and gorgeous mutated nature … Continue reading "Utopia by Necessity, with Nils Deneken"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 92. Damon Reece is the lead writer on Necrobarista, a visual novel about death and coffee (and therefore the rest of life) rendered in a bespoke-unto-madness 3D anime style and set very definitively in Melbourne, Australia. It’s in most ways a visual novel, but there are key ways in which it couldn’t … Continue reading "All Things Liminal and Bespoke, with Damon Reece"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 91. Drew and Lucio check in on the state of co-op games, especially online ones, in this strange isolated times. How has co-op changed over the past few decades, both in character and in quantity? Why are we so drawn to cooperative games, and why (for us) does team competition just not … Continue reading "Refusing to Compete, Choosing to Cooperate"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 90. Warren Arnold has been with Jackbox Games since they were Jellyvision, having worked first on the Facebook iteration of You Don’t Know Jack, and later on every Jackbox Party Pack, including the forthcoming seventh one. Here he talks about the peculiarities of Jackbox Games’ design process, the finer points of comedy … Continue reading "We All Just Want Attention, with Warren Arnold"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 89. Ilan Eshkeri has had a storied career in film and television—from Layer Cake, 47 Ronin, and Ninja Assassin, to Black Sea, Still Alice, Austenland, and the Shaun the Sheep Movie—and has recently been working in video games as well. He’s now taken the playful reactive soundtracking tricks he honed on The … Continue reading "How Conflict Sounds, with Ilan Eshkeri"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 88. Brendon Chung is the main creative force behind Atom Zombie Smasher, Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, Flotilla, Flotilla 2, Quadrilateral Cowboy, and the upcoming Skin Deep. Laura Michet is an accomplished writer, and a perhaps equally accomplished editor, having lent her talents to Industries of Titan, Frog Fractions 2, and … Continue reading "Workdays in Hell Dimension, with Laura Michet and Brendon Chung"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 87. Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux outrun the Hunter to join us again and talk about Space Chase, their co-op tabletop map-’em-up and the delightful follow-up to their assiduously PvP card game Wicked Apples. This is, to put it mildly, a strange time to be making indie tabletop games—not only because tabletop … Continue reading "Space Chasing Together, Apart, with Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 86. Moo Yu stops by to talk about his work on Knights and Bikes, Subsurface Circular, LittleBigPlanet, and several of the Ratchet & Clank games—plus his advocacy, activism, and mentorship via POC in Play. Beyond that, he gets into a deep, generous discussion about the strange position of the code itself in … Continue reading "Talking about Way More than Coding, with Moo Yu"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 85. Greg Haynes is the Lead Games User Researcher at AbleGamers, an organization dedicated, simply but profoundly, to making sure that everyone can play video games, regardless of disability. That’s a huge mandate, serving a dauntingly large and diverse group of players. So in this interview, Greg talks us through AbleGamers’ philosophy … Continue reading "Access and Challenge, with Greg Haynes"

ETAO Podcast, Episode 84. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been stealing hearts, blowing up timelines, and filling in blanks in our shared social fabric for about two surreally protracted months now. For once, the zeitgeist hasn’t outrun our goofy, research-heavy way of picking topics! So in this episode, Lauren Villegas joins in to talk about … Continue reading "Everything Animal Crossing, and Everything Else"