Episodes

Send us Fan Mail Today I’m talking with Clint Hocking, Creative Director of Far Cry 2 and Watch Dogs: Legion. Clint has had a long and varied career in the video game industry, working on the original Splinter Cell games, as well as roles at Ubisoft, Valve, LucasArts, and Amazon Game Studios. This ended up being one of the most dense and thought-provoking conversations I’ve had the privilege of recording. The way Clint thinks about video games and how we as players engage with them was such a...

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode, I speak with Ben Fisher, Head of Design on Atomfall and Sniper Elite: Resistance. Ben is a key creative figure at Rebellion, and we take a deep dive into the philosophy and design process behind Atomfall’s open-world RPG structure. We talk about the steps that Atomfall had to go through to teach players how to engage with the world they were entering from the very first moments. Atomfall has a different pace to your average open world game, so Ben br...

Send us Fan Mail Today I sit down with Kelsey Beachum, writer of Outer Wilds, for a deeply honest conversation about the creative process, including what it was like collaborating with her brother Alex Beachum on one of the most loved indie games of the past decade. Kelsey clearly poured so much of herself into the writing for Outer Wilds. I actually had no idea just how personal this game was for her. This of course bought up a ton of questions about what it must be like to put your heart o...

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode I speak with game developer Nina Freeman about mistakes, reflection, and the role personal experience can play in game design. Nina is known for her autobiographical approach to games, incorporating real moments from her own life into projects like Cibele, as well as her work on Tacoma and, more recently, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. We talk about her early experiences with games, from edutainment titles at the public library through to discovering...

Send us Fan Mail The Examined Game #5 In today’s episode I speak with Chris Wade, creator of Big Hops. Big Hops immediately caught my attention as a platformer. While most modern platformers still build on the foundations laid down in the 1990s, Big Hops takes inspiration from emergent gameplay systems found in games like Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Arkane Studio's Dishonored and applies to the platformer genre. If that sounds like an interesting proposition you're...

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode I speak with Mario R. Kroll, founder of UberStrategist . Mario has spent more than 30 years working across PR, publishing and marketing in the video game industry, helping studios figure out how to get their games noticed in an increasingly crowded market. This was a candid conversation about visibility, marketing, networking and the realities of trying to launch games today. We talk about what actually gets a game noticed, why so many developers leave mark...

Send us Fan Mail The Examined Game #4 In this episode of The Examined Game I speak with Erik Wolpaw on writing for video games. Erik is best known for his work on Portal, Portal 2, the Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, as well as his time at Valve and Double Fine Productions working on Psychonauts. We talk about environmental storytelling, just how difficult it is to make games funny, and how much of Portal’s world was built through suggestion rather than expo...

Send us Fan Mail The Examined Game #3 Julia Minamata is the solo developer of The Crimson Diamond, a love letter to the classic Sierra On-Line parser adventures. I adored playing The Crimson Diamond and wanted to talk with Julia about the power of play in video games and why classic adventure games still resonate so strongly with players today. We discuss Julia’s inspiration for the game and the idea of building a game like a doll’s house for the player to lose themselves in. We wade into som...

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode I speak with Larry Kuperman, Vice President of Business Development at Nightdive Studios. Larry retired not long after this interview, so I was pleased to chat with such an industry veteran. Nightdive have made a well-deserved name for themselves with their remakes and remasters of classic games including System Shock, System Shock 2, Blade Runner, Star Wars: Dark Forces, The Thing, Quake and many others. I sat down with Larry to discuss the ups and downs o...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with co-lead game designer on the original Uncharted trilogy, Richard Lemarchand, to talk about the creative process Naughty Dog took when making Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and how Naughty Dog approached pacing, cinematic gameplay and level design. Richard talks about working alongside Amy Hennig, Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann on the original Uncharted trilogy, and how the studio evolved from games like Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter into more story-driven g...