My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

Corrine 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.

My guest today is the American voice-actor and activist Sarah Elmaleh. As a student at Wesleyan University she performed in a variety of theatrical productions and radio plays, spending a portion of her studies at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford. After graduating she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and was working as a stage actor when she fell in with the city's game development scene, and decided to commit her life to the art form. She moved to Los Angeles and began voicing characters in blockbuster games such as Fortnite, Halo Infinite, Gears of War 5, as well as critically acclaimed indie titles such as Afterparty, Pyre, and Gone Home. During this time, she began working as a liaison between game developers and the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA. Today, she sits as chair of the union’s Interactive Media unit, working to secure workplace measures that are common elsewhere in Hollywood.

My guest today is the founder and director of ZeniMax Online Studio, Matt Firor. After studying history at George Washington University, he co-founded the developer Interesting Systems Inc., where he created a MUD-style text adventure titled Darkness Falls. In 1995 he co-founded Mythic Entertainment, where he produced pioneering online games such as Godzilla Online, Aliens Online, Starship Troopers: Battlespace, and, in 2001, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot and its first two expansions. This experience then led my guest to found ZeniMax Online Studio in 2007 and start building the MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online. It launched in 2014, and, ten years later, my guest continues to lead development. According to the company’s latest figures, since its launch The Elder Scrolls Online has generated more than $2 billion in revenue.

My guest today is Hannah Nicklin, a British writer and narrative designer for video games. After studying Drama at Loughborough University, and Playwriting at the University of Birmingham, she returned to Loughborough for a doctorate in interactive design as anti-capitalist practice.After several years working as a poet, theatre-maker, and academic, in 2019 she moved into games full time: writing, narrative designing and co-producing Mutazione, the most nominated game in the 2020 IGF awards. That same year she became studio lead of Die Gute Fabrik, an independent game studio based in Copenhagen, Denmark.There she led and creative directed Saltsea Chronicles, one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2023. After the studio was forced to close down, my guest joined the team at the Netflix-owned studio Night School, where she currently works as a narrative designer and writer on a yet-to-be-announced title. LINKSCasual Games for ProtestersHannah on Bluesky

My guest today is the award-winning humourist, writer, and presenter Danny Wallace. Born in Dundee, Scotland, he published his first professional video game review at the age of thirteen while conducting work experience for Sega Power, a magazine that subsequently offered him a job. At 22, after graduating from The University of Westminster, he became a BBC comedy producer at, working on hit series such as Dead Ringers and The Mighty Boosh. In 2003 he published Join Me, a book about how he accidentally started a cult. His next book, Yes Man charted a six-month-long experiment in which he said “yes” to everything. It later became a blockbuster film starring Jim Carrey in the lead role. A regular guest on radio and television panel shows, he has remained deeply involved in video games too, providing the narration for the hit indie game Thomas Was Alone, and writing and starring in several Assassin’s Creed game, work for which received an outstanding achievement award from the Writer’s Guild of America.

My guest today is Nainita Desai, the British composer for film, television and video games. Born and raised in London by her Indian parents, she earned a degree in mathematics, then studied sound design at the National Film and Television School. She started her career as a sound designer on the films Little Buddha, Lessons of Darkness and Death Machine, before branching into composition for television, including, among hundreds of others, the Oscar-nominated For Sama, the hit Netflix series American Murder and the BBC drama series Unprecedented. In 2022 she won the Emmy for ‘Outstanding Music Composition’ for her work on The Reason I Jump, a film that explores the experiences of non-speaking autistic people around the world. More recently she has entered the world of video games, composing the scores for Telling Lies, Immortality, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and, most recently, Tales of Kenzera: Zau for which she has been nominated for a World Soundtrack Award. 

My guest today is the American video game designer and programmer Eugene Jarvis. Born in California, he studied computer science at Berkeley, where, in the basement of the physics laboratory, he played the early video game Spacewar. After graduating he worked for Hewlitt Packard, but quit after three days to join Atari, where he began programming for some of the first computerised pinball machines. In the late seventies he joined Williams where he and a colleague came up with the idea for a side-scrolling arcade game set on an alien planet. Defender became a hit in the arcades; the game has grossed more than $1.5 billion since 1981. More hitsfollowed: Robotron 2084 –– the first twin-stick shooter -- Smash TV and Cruis’n USA. In 2008, my guest was named DePaul University's first Game Designer in Residence. He remains the only game-maker to have one of his creations featured on a U.S. postage stamp. 

My guest today is the German filmmaker Uwe Boll. Born in Wermelskirchen he decided he wanted to direct films at the age of ten, after seeing Marlon Brando star in Mutiny on the Bounty. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-thirties, however, that he directed his first major motion picture, Blackwoods, a psychological thriller that a critic for the New York Times described as ‘smart and diabolical’.It was, however, his adaptations of video games for which he made his name. House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, Far Cry and Postal were just some of the games he adapted to film. Not all of them lost money, but most were derided by reviewers.My guest did not shy away from engaging his harshest critics, however. In 2006 he challenged five of them to a boxing match. Ten years later he announced his retirement from filmmaking. Nevertheless, since then he has announced several new projects, including First Shift, a police drama set in the New York, that released in the summer.Links:Boll Films Official WebsiteGame Over, Uwe Boll -- Vanity Fair.