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My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin
Kieron Gillen, comic book author (Star Wars, X-Men, Iron Man, DIE).
My guest today is an award-winning creator and writer of comic books. Born into a Staffordshire working-class family, he was a student of Applied Biology at Bath University when he started contributing to the prominent computer games magazine Amiga Power. Upon graduation, my guest joined the staff of PC Gamer, then left the magazine to go freelance in 2003.
The following year he published a highly influential manifesto calling for a new mode of first-person, subjective writing about video games that he dubbed New Games Journalism. Two years later, he published his first comic book, Phonogram, which described music as a kind of transformational magic. After founding the PC gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun in 2007, my guest left journalism for good to work on comic books, including X-Men, Iron Man, and Star Wars, a series for which he also created the character, Doctor Aphra.
He has continued to work on his own projects, including Wicked + the Divine, Once & Future and DIE, a horror series about tabletop role-playing games for which he received four of his six Hugo Award nominations.
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Best of 2024 (Part 1).
01:11:54|Enjoy this collection of some of our favourite clips from My Perfect Console episodes released in 2024.
Console of the Year Award (2024).
14:15|A special episode with the winner of the My Perfect Console of the Year award, as voted by the listeners to the show.
Game of the Year 2024 (ft. Glenn Moore).
01:25:22|Has 2024 been a good year for video games? Host Simon Parkin and comedian Glenn Moore each pick their five favourites of the year. Will any of their choices overlap? Will the game in the top spot start with a vowel?
102. G. T. Karber, crime writer, Murdle.
01:25:41||Ep. 102My guest today is G. T. Karber, the innovative crime writer and creator of the Murdle series of puzzle books. The son of a judge and a civil rights attorney, he studied mathematics and English literature at the University of Arkansas, then took a Masters at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. It was while he was working on a project in a coffee shop that he scribbled down a crime-themed puzzle on a napkin for a friend. He later put the puzzle online, then added another. Two weeks later his now agent wrote to him offering to help turn the puzzles into a compendium. In the UK, Murdle became the bestselling book of Christmas 2023, outselling The Guinness World Records. Murdle: The School of Mystery, the fourth entry to the series, launched in October.
101. Billy Basso, game-maker, Animal Well.
01:21:29||Ep. 101Billy Basso is an American creator of video games. Born in Chicago, he studied film, then earned his masters in Computer Science at DePaul University. After a stint working as a video editor, he moved into game development, first making educational games for schools in Chicago, and later at NetherRealm Studios, where he worked on smartphone versions of Mortal Kombat and Injustice. In May this year, my guest published Animal Well, a game which he started to work on in his spare time in 2017. For the game, my guest created a bespoke engine, designed all of the art and animations, and composed the music. In it, players explore a dense and magical labyrinth at the bottom of a water well. Released to widespread acclaim, Edge magazine described it as “a beautifully constructed, wonderfully characterful adventure… that marks the blossoming of a major talent.”
Correspondence Special #5: The Best Video Game SFX?
35:44|In this special correspondence edition, Simon reads out your correspondence and answers your questions. Which ten games have been picked in the first 100 episodes more than any others? What are the best Christmas-themed video games? What are the best video game sound effects of all time? Who are the video game industry's true founding fathers (or mothers)? And a special teaser for Simon's next book project.
100. Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia.
01:27:03||Ep. 100Jordan Mechner is an American author, game designer, graphic novelist and screenwriter. While a student at Yale University he designed and programmed the martial arts game Karateka. To create the animations in the game he pioneered a rotoscoping process to capture Super 8 film footage of his friends and family members. My guest further developed this technique for his next game. Prince of Persia became a best-seller, then a series, then, in 2010, a film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, and Ben Kingsley, for which my guest also wrote the screenplay. In 2017, he moved to Montpellier, France where he has authored several graphic novels, including, most recently, an autobiographical work titled, Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family.
99. Andy McNamara, former editor-in-chief, Game Informer.
01:22:03||Ep. 99Andy Macnamars is the former editor-in-chief of Game Informer. He joined the bi-monthly magazine for its launch in 1991 as an editorial assistant. Within eighteen months he had been promoted to editor’s seat, which he the occupied for 25 years, growing the magazine’s readership from around 60,000 subscribers to, at its height, eight million, making it one of the most widely read publications anywhere. In 2020 he left Game Informer following a round of layoffs and joined Electronic Arts, where he is currently the Head of Integrated Comms for Battlefield. Earlier this year GameStop closed Game Informer. My guest tweeted at the time: ‘As someone who was there at issue one and spent most of their life fighting and scratching and clawing for GI, it breaks my heart to see it end.”
98. Corinne Busche & John Epler, game directors, Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
01:18:06||Ep. 98Corrine and John are the director and creative director of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Corinne Busche majored in digital animation at the University of Utah. In 2006 she joined the studio now known as EA Saltlake, working through the ranks to become a Design Director for The Sims series.John Epler studied English language and literature at the University of Alberta. After graduating, he was selling televisions when he applied to be a tester at Bioware. At the studio he began working as a writer and director of cinematics.Now, the pair have come together to lead development on the latest entry to the beloved Dragon Age RPG series, which launched at the end of October.