My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

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Phil Wang, comedian. Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is the British-Malaysian stand-up comedian and comedy writer Phil Wang. Born in the UK, when he was one week old his parents moved to Malaysia, where he attended school until the age of sixteen. The family then returned to England, moving to Bath in Somerset, which my guest once described as “a spa town for people who find Cheltenham too ethnic'.

While studying Engineering at King’s College Cambridge, he joined the Footlights drama club, of which he later became president. Since graduating, Wang has performed with the sketch comedy group Daphne, and become a fixture on British televisions, appearing on Have I Got News for You, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and as a contestant on the seventh season of Taskmaster.

He also co-hosts the podcast Budpod with his friend and fellow comedian, Pierre Novelli, where, among many other things, the pair often discuss video games.

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Shahid Ahmad, former director, Sony PlayStation. Mar 06, 2023

Show notes

Shahid Ahmad was a schoolboy living on a London council estate when he sold his prized BMX bike to raise money for programming books and taught himself to write computer games. After several knock-backs, in 1983, at the age of seventeen, he sold a game for £300 to a commercial publisher.

He soon made a name for himself in the emerging Britsoft scene, programming the Commodore 64 version of Jet Set Willy, which sold more than a million copies. Having worked on dozens of his own games, included Chimera and Pandora, in 2005 he joined Sony PlayStation where he commissioned more than a hundred titles including the hits No Man’s Sky and Hellblade.

Today he mentors industry newcomers, produces games designed to promote mental health, and sits on the board of the British Games Institute, the video game equivalent of the BFI.

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Phil Fish, creator of Fez. Feb 27, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is the reclusive designer of one of the greatest video games yet made. He studied game design in Montreal and, after a brief stint working at Ubisoft, left to begin work on a game of his own, a platformer that combined the art style of the Super Nintendo classics of his youth, with perspective-shifting innovations of his own.

Six years in the making, Fez launched in 2012 to near universal acclaim, part of the first wave of so-called indie games. After featuring heavily in the film documentary Indie Game: the Movie, my guest, who is passionately outspoken, became the subject of co-ordinated online attacks, which culminated in his retreat from public platforms, nearly a decade ago.

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Heather Anne Campbell, comedian, screenwriter (Rick and Morty). Feb 20, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is an Emmy-nominated writer, sketch comedian, voice actor and performer. As a teenager she studied improv comedy at the famous ImprovOlympic studio in her home city of Chicago, training that prepared her for when she later starred on Whose Line Is It Anyway and the sketch comedy show Key and Peele.

She has worked on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, The Twilight Zone and, most recently, the sixth season of Rick & Morty. Throughout her career she has also written and talked about video games, not least in her current role as one of the hosts of the popular games-related podcast, Get Played.

“Comedy and video-games are the same thing: fantasies within set rules,” she once said. “I love both of them, equally. When I can marry the two in some future project, I'll be complete.”

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Tarn Adams, creator of Dwarf Fortress. Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is the American co-creator of one of the longest-running and most popular independent games yet made. In high school he and his older brother Zach designed adventure games based on fantasy and science fiction stories they invented together. He taught himself computer programming and received fifteen offers to enrol in PhD math programs.

At Stanford University, he and his brother continued work on a procedural adventure game called Dwarf Fortress, in which players guide successive generations of dwarves to build and maintain a settlement.

He quit university to work on the game full-time; in 2011 the New York Times described an early version as “perhaps the most complex video game ever made”. Dwarf Fortress became his life’s work, with a vast and committed cult following, but it remained a work in progress until December 2022, when a commercial version finally released, and promptly sold half a million copies.

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Dara Ó Briain, comedian. Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is a stand-up comedian, television presenter and Irish national treasure. He studied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at University College, Dublin, where during a debate, he cracked a joke, made the audience laugh, and forever doomed himself to chasing that high.

Since then, he has toured the world as a comic, as well as becoming a prolific television host: he has chaired Mock the Week, Have I Got New For You, Blockbusters, Robot Wars, Stargazing Live, and the video game-themed quiz show, Go 8Bit. A lifelong video game player, he regularly hosts the game BAFTAs, and performs games-related routines in his stand-up.

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Ashly Burch, actor (Mythic Quest, The Last of Us, Horizon). Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

[Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of addiction to prescription pain medication and fatal overdose.]

My guest today is an American writer and performer who stars in Apple TV’s Mythic Quest series, and who has, in recent years, voiced some of video gaming’s best-loved characters. She grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and rose to prominence via the web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’, in which she starred alongside her brother, Anthony.

Since then she has become a prolific voice actor for cartoons and video games; her roles include Mel from The Last of Us series, Aloy from the Horizon games, and Chloe Price from Life Is Strange.

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Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle. Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is a software engineer who, in 2021, released a word game that soon became a global obsession. He grew up in a Welsh farming village, attended the Royal Holloway University, then moved to North America to study for a Masters. In 2011, after graduating, he joined the staff of the website Reddit, where he began to design experimental games such as The Button, Place and, in his spare time, a game called Wordle.

Several years later he returned to the Wordle prototype, which he finished and uploaded to his personal website in October 2021. Within a month the game had 90 players. Within two, it had 300,000. A week after that, it was being played by two million people, and had caught the attention of the New York Times, which in January 2022, acquired the game for a seven-figure sum.

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Trailer Jan 16, 2023

Show notes

Welcome to My Perfect Console with author, New Yorker journalist and The Observer's video game critic, Simon Parkin.

Each week a guest picks the five video games they would like to immortalise on their very own fictional games console.

Trailer episode featuring clips from forthcoming episodes with Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, and Charles Cecil MBE, co-founder of Revolution Software, creator of the Broken Sword video game series.

Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole

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