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My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin
Luke Muscat, gamemaker (Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride).
My guest today is Luke Muscat, the Australian video game designer behind some of the best-known smart phone games yet made. After graduating from Queensland University of Technology with a degree in IT and Games, he joined Halfbrick Studio, a game developer in Brisbane that specialised in games licensed from film and TV.
There he designed a simple yet compelling iPhone game in which players must slice fruit thrown into the air by swiping the device's touch screen with their finger. Fruit Ninja released in 2010. Within a year it had sold more than 20 million copies. In 2011 my guest developed another once-in-a-lifetime hit with Jetpack Joyride, a game that won a slew of design awards and that continues to be a bestseller today. After a stint working as head of design for the company that makes Snapchat, in 2022 my guest went independent, and is now preparing to release his first indie title, Feed The Deep, a lovecraftian deep sea roguelike.
LINKS
Feed the Deep Steam Page
Luke's Game Dev YouTube Channel
Quake 'Annihilation' video.
Simon's 2013 New Yorker piece on 'endless runners'
Daryl Baxter's 50 Years of Boss Fights.
More episodes
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34:44|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.86. Maddy Thorson, game-maker (Towerfall, Celeste).
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33:53||Ep. 83A 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.82. Steve Meretszky, author of interactive fiction (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; A Mind Forever Voyaging).
01:18:00||Ep. 82My 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.