Billy Joe Cain is back at it again. And this time, it is the finale.
BJC was the first interview I conducted for the show and it was dynamic because he had a lot of personal experiences to share with me throughout his long relationship with games.
Episode 12 — Neversoft, Infinity Ward
This week’s guest is Simon Ko, an artist who has done concept art for the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises.
Originally a concept artist specializing in vehicle design, Simon got picked up to do work with Neversoft on a little known franchise called Guitar Hero. This work with Neversoft merged into a career with Infinity Ward working on the Call of Duty franchises.
Episode 11 — King of (the long) Kon
Twin Galaxies has officially dropped the ban hammer on a second prominent world record holding champion: Billy Mitchell.
The scrutiny against Mitchell’s scores came on the heels of the ban against Todd Rogers, after a member of the Donkey Kong forums posted evidence that Mitchell may have used MAME, an emulator, to achieve scores he claims were won on an original arcade cabinet. A few weeks later, Apollo Legend dropped some evidence of his own.
If you’ve caught all of the episodes of the show, you’re acquainted with Scott. He’s been a guest so many times because his perspective is vast. He joins me today to talk about Billy Mitchell and his time working with Twin Galaxies in addition to the ways those experiences still impact his life today and what the real takeaway from the ban is.
Episode 10 — The Simulation Football League (SFL)
What is the Simulation Football League you ask? It’s a football league that YOU could play in. You, as in the universal you. And with me today to school us on the game is the Commissioner of the League himself: Cameron Irvine.
The SFL currently boasts 18 teams spread out across North America and the UK, with more than 200 players, coaches, owners, and broadcasters around the world that work and play to stream two seasons every year.
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Episode 9 — What do Madden and Medici have in common?
The answer to that question is this weeks guest: André Thomas.
André is the CEO of Triseum who has quite the resume to back up his history working in games. He has spent more than 20 years in CGI production, working on films such as Men in Black and Independence Day, in addition to being appointed head of graphics over the EA Sports football franchise that includes Madden, NCAA, and more.
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Episode 8 — Do video games cause violence?
ICYMI: Members of the video game industry met with President Trump and some other congressional voices to talk about video game’s potential for causing violence in American society. The agenda included a little montage of cherry picked scenes depicting humans killing other humans. Watch the video for yourself, courtesy of the White House:
With these claims circulating the news and social media come calls for heavier regulations and even bans on violent content (please tell me you read the list of games he would ban, PLEASE). Something that is often missing from the narrative is an actual counter-argument.
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Episode 7 — Origin – EA
In today’s episode of the show I sit down with Billy Joe Cain to talk today about his time working as a level designer for Origin, around the time that they got bought by Electronic Arts, and other companies, along with the general experience of developing and porting games for home consoles in the 90’s and early 00’s.
Episode 6 — The National Videogame Museum
We’re baaack! And by we, I mean me.
This week, I’ve got John Hardie with me to talk about the National Video Game Museum.
The biggest suprise — for me, anyway — was learning that the museum was in my backyard. Granted it’s about four hours from me in Frisco, but it’s still in Texas.
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Growing pains
As I truck on, continue to conduct interviews, and learn more and more each day that I am garbage at editing (for now), I’m learning that there is more to this than originally anticipated. And, honestly, I anticipated a lot.
The things I couldn’t anticipate for, though, have turned into true road blocks.
Episode 5 — Newgrounds.com
“A living history of the internet.” Tom Fulp wasn’t wrong when he said that Newgrounds.com was just that.
Tom is the true pioneer to online content creation. His first webspace was up and running in 1995, but four years earlier, at the tender age of 13, Tom sought to bring people together (even if it wasn’t initially intended for the web).
Some of the Internet’s first truly viral content was created by Tom himself, including a flash game using the likeness of the childhood horror show the Teletubbies that earned him a pretty lawsuit courtesy of PBS. Inside Edition reached out at a time to cover another game — Assassin, a flash game that was uploaded around the same time as Club a Seal — that prompted Tom to purchase the domain name Newgrounds.com, and thus a surviving relic of the early internet was born.
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