My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

My guest today is an American businessman and the former and first president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Chris Deering. Raised in Boston, Massachusetts to immigrant parents, my guest had a strict upbringing. Despite the disadvantages he faced, he graduated with distinction with a degree in computer science at Boston College, then studied marketing at Harvard Business School. He first worked for the razor-manufacturer Gillette, rising to the rank of head of worldwide shaving, then joined Atari, then Columbia Pictures. In 1995 he became president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, responsible for launching the company’s first console, the PlayStation, remaining at the company until 2005. “They were,” he once told me, “the best ten years of my life.” 

My guest today is Eliot Higgins, a British citizen journalist and founder of Bellingcat, a website that specialises in open-source intelligence. In 2012, while unemployed, he became involved in online discussions about the conflict in Syria, where few journalists were able to operate. Despite having little prior interest in the region, he began to study videos of the conflict, and started a blog on which he analysed geodata and weaponry. This work exposed atrocities and helped establish an evidence base for crimes allegedly committed by the Syrian government. In 2013 Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer told the New Yorker: “he’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.” In the decade since, however, Bellingcat has broken dozens more, investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, and exposing the true identities of the Russian spies who the British government claims poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018. Throughout all of this, my guest has remained a keen player of video games –– despite quitting World of Warcraft for fear his marriage might not survive his addiction. And he says that being part of these online communities has been instrumental in honing his talents. 

In this special episode, Simon is joined by comedian Glenn Moore to discuss the subject of July's My Perfect Console 'Game Club', The Messenger.Throughout July 2024, Glenn and Simon, along with many of you, the listeners, played through the 2018 platformer The Messenger, a game chosen by Abu Salim during his episode of My Perfect Console.Glenn and Simon discuss their experiences with the game, with input from you the listeners. They also talk about how Glenn managed to break his Nintendo Switch, the popular game series that neither of us have clicked with, and which video game-themed subject Glenn should pick for his forthcoming appearance on Celebrity Mastermind...If you would like to listen to the full back catalogue of Game Club episodes head to www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole and become a supporter. Your monthly subscription –– about the cost of a magazine –– helps to fund the podcast, and comes with a range of supporter-only benefits.

My guest today is Maddy Thorson, a Canadian writer and designer for video games. At the age of 14, she obtained a copy of GameMaker, software on which she learned to make simple games. After studying computer science at Grande Prairie Regional College in Alberta, she moved to Vancouver and there rented a house in which she and her friends began working on a multiplayer combat game featuring four archers. TowerFall Ascension, became a huge hit.The following year, my guest took part in a game jam and co-created a game based on her experiences bouldering. That experiment grew into Celeste, which cast players as Madeline, a young woman suffering from anxiety and depression who aims to climb a mountain. En route, she meets manifestations of her self-doubt, which try to halt her progress.A commercial version of Celeste launched in 2018 and became a smash hit. It won Best Independent Game at the Game Awards and in 2022 was ranked fourteenth in a USA Today list of the best games ever made.

My guest today is Holly Gramazio, a writer, curator, and game designer. Born in Australia, she earned her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, then moved to London where she founded the Somerset House-based games festival Now Play This, an annual celebration of experimental games. In 2019 she wrote the script for Dicey Dungeons, a game that subsequently sold 850,000 copies and won the Indiecade Grand Jury Prize. In April this year, Vintage Books published her debut novel “The Husbands”,  in which a young single woman discovers a limitless supply of husbands in her attic. The Times has described the book as “a brilliant satire on the Tinder generation’s commitment issues.” LINKSHolly's websiteThe Husbands generatorNow Play This festivalSimon's write up of this year's NPT(Photo by Diana Patient.)

In this special episode, five My Perfect Console supporters share the games they would like to put on their ideal, fictional games machine, and the reasons behind their choices. If you would like to share your console with the My Perfect Console audience, head to www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole where you can become a supporter and receive a raft of these and other benefits.

A special episode to celebrate the life and work of Brett Jones, an artist and animator for video games, film and television who passed away in July. Jones worked on the seminal N64 movie tie-in game, Goldeneye 007, which successfully brought the first person shooter genre to consoles. He made instrumental contributions to its sequel, Perfect Dark, then left the games industry to create VFX for film and television, contributing work to The Last Jedi, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Dr Who. This is a previously unreleased interview with Jones, conducted in 2022 as research for a Guardian article commemorating the 25th anniversary of Goldeneye 007.LINKSThe game’s Bond: the making of Nintendo classic GoldenEye 007 – The Guardian.Fundraiser for art exhibition of Brett's work, scheduled for November 2024.Brett's website.

My guest today is the American video game developer Steve Meretzky. Born and raised in Yonkers, New York, he attended MIT, where he earned a degree in construction management. In 1981, after two years spent working in the construction industry, a friend asked him if he would like to become a tester for Infocom, a publisher that specialised in interactive fiction. He agreed and was soon invited to write a game of his own, the science fiction game Planetfall.After he included a reference to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the game, my guest was invited to collaborate with Adams in adapting the novel into a best-selling game. In 1988 he wrote A Mind Forever Voyaging, an ambitious and politically charged work that stretched the boundaries of what a video game could do ––and saw him become one of the first interactive fiction writers admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America.After stints working for Blue Fang Games, Playdom and King, he is currently VP of design at the mobile games company PeopleFun.LINKSBBC Documentary from 1985 takes us inside Infocom.Play 30th Anniversary Edition of Hitchhiker's Guide in your browser.Google's AI experiment with Zork...Hire Ed Hawkins to voice your game.