It's been a while since we've had a music-focused episode, but the imminent arrival of the PlayStation mini seemed like a good opportunity to revisit the greatest (maybe?) era of game tunes. A whole bunch of developers seized on the PS1's incredible audio features to create suitably awesome soundtra...
2018-11-26 15:00:00 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone, sorry we didn't get a bonus episode up yesterday per usual. Bob has been traveling and was prevented from returning home for several days by the California wildfires, so he wasn't able to record his piece on his intended schedule. It'll be up as soon as he's back home and able to recor...
2018-11-24 13:13:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Another listener request topic this week—one that was a bit of a challenge to coordinate, to be honest. This was our THIRD attempt to line up and coordinate schedules for people who could speak to the topic, and even then it didn't go entirely right—one of our guests dropped out at the last seco...
2018-11-19 12:37:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone, here's an episode that prrrrrobably should have run a few months ago! Whoops! Back at BitSummit in May, I got together with Retronauts regular D. Feit (now a contributor to the site!) to talk about the at-the-time-very-recently-announced SNK 40th Anniversary Collection for Switch, give...
2018-11-12 13:00:42 +0000 UTC View Post
So. Maybe you thought we were a bunch of bozos for talking about the SEGA Genesis' 30th anniversary despite not having been Genesis owners back in the day. Maybe you thought we weren't qualified to have opinions on that system and its video games. Maybe you were powerfully angry that we aligned ours...
2018-11-09 16:52:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Ah, Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon: The twin jewels of '90s anime. Though many series have surpassed these two in longevity and popularity, these anime titans hold sole responsibility for getting so many Americans into anime during the late 90s, when Japanese animation wasn't so commonplace in our coun...
2018-11-05 08:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Sega's Genesis (well, Mega Drive) turns 30 years old TODAY. And so to celebrate, a bunch of dudes who didn't own Genesis consoles at the time talk about the system! Ah, but don't worry, we asked YOU to help, and there's a great listener mail section to make up for our collective weaknesses. Plus, th...
2018-10-29 20:51:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, this game really SUCKS! But only because it's supposed to. This week on Retronauts, we jump back to the ancient year of 2001 to dig deep into Luigi's Mansion: the GameCube launch title that underwhelmed at the time, but really holds up today. And, thanks to a new 3DS port, it's more playable th...
2018-10-26 20:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This patron-requested episode comes to you courtesy of Jeff Vlasek, whose topic suggestion resulted in a conversation that went in some unexpected directions... interesting directions, but not the ones we really anticipated.
Description: Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey talk to USgamer's Caty McCa...
2018-10-22 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's show is another one of those "Huh, how have we not covered this yet?" Or else a "What is wrong with Jeremy's memory that he doesn't remember covering it yet?" episode. Getting old is rough, man.
And speaking of aging gracelessly, how about Double Dragon? While this series has ...
2018-10-15 12:51:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Last month, I joined Bob and Henry (Gilbert) to discuss the history of the G.I. Joe cartoon; this week's bonus episode is a follow-up to that, with a dive into all the classic/not-so-classic games based on G.I. Joe... uh, and quite a bit of discussion of the comic book. Which is to be expected when ...
2018-10-12 12:43:25 +0000 UTC View Post
The latest chapter in our Final Fantasy deep-dive series is here, and it... isn't Final Fantasy. Instead, we're going in-depth on Final Fantasy's step-sibling, Chrono Trigger. Kat Bailey and Chris Kohler join us to travel back and forth through time—yeah, it's a...
2018-10-08 14:24:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi! Welcome to October! Here's a podcast I recorded in May. [comical music sting]
Yeah, so I've been holding onto this one for a while, but now the story can be told. I had the good fortune to lock down Q-Games boss Dylan Cuthbert for an hour and a half back at BitSummit (thanks to company compose...
2018-10-01 11:31:19 +0000 UTC View Post
When Mario debuted in 1981's Donkey Kong, he entered a gaming landscape devoid of voice acting, so Nintendo never stopped to think, "Hey, what's this little guy supposed to sound like?" Over the years, though, as Mario entered the world of cartoons, live-action TV shows, and movies, someone had to s...
2018-09-28 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
We at Retronauts regret to inform you once again that something is very old. (Hey, we're just doing our job.) That's right: The PlayStation 2 turns 18 this month, and to celebrate its passage into adulthood we've put together two whole hours of podcasting fun about Sony's market-dominating beast of ...
2018-09-24 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
As promised in last week's not-Micro episode, here were have another journey into the arcade catalog of a coin-op legend. This time it's Namco, and unfortunately the hits are a little thinner on the ground than they were in our previous Namco episode. There are some classics, no question, but also l...
2018-09-17 12:11:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, it was inevitable. Bob and I have decided to drop the "Micro" naming scheme for our biweekly Friday podcasts. Now they're just... Retronauts. This episode was the camel-back-breaking straw, since it ended up clocking in at 75 minutes, which is frankly long enough to justify being called plain ...
2018-09-13 12:30:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The next chapter of the show's steady march through the history of role-playing games has arrived. No creator interview this time, though; Yuji Horii's a little tough to get locked down for a podcast, as you might imagine. But we do our best here, by finding some experts.
For the first segme...
2018-09-10 12:11:15 +0000 UTC View Post
With this episode, we've now explored 20 years of SEGA arcade greats. (And some not-so-greats... but mostly greats.) This final chapter of our SEGA saga takes us up to the year 2000 and a whole lot of games you probably know better from Dreamcast. Ben Elgin and Benj Edwards join for this rootin' too...
2018-09-03 12:55:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Normally listener mail shows up in segments accompanying the relevant topic or else many months after the fact, but this time we're doing something a little different. This mailbag segment concerns topics in several episodes that haven't gone live yet, which means it's a look at things to c...
2018-08-31 11:53:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Ha, ha... get it? Right.
Well, anyway, change of routine here—Bob's off on vacation this week, and I have a massive backlog of episodes that need to be posted (no, seriously, I have almost 20 recorded and in the wings). So I'm stepping in this month to catch up while he winds down. Don't worry, ...
2018-08-27 12:03:06 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone, following on the recent Tron episode, we have a question for you. We've produced a few episodes this year that have focused on non-game properties that inspired video games, and these have had a heavier emphasis on the original works (which were mostly very interesting classic...
2018-08-25 00:16:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello, friendos — here's a Retronauts podcast about (gasp) a brand-new game. But it has an old soul. And it kind of works as an epilogue to our Metroidvania history series of episodes, too.
I've been following Chasm since back in the days when 1UP.com existed, if you can believe that. B...
2018-08-20 13:07:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Another month, another Micro that is, in fact, way too long to be a Micro.
This time, we look at another movie and its tie-in games. The line's a lot blurrier here, though, because the movie in question is Disney's Tron, which is basically a video game in movie form. There's really ...
2018-08-17 11:55:54 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's episode is the companion to the Ultima podcast from a couple of months ago. We begin with a studio segment featuring Jason Wilson and Rowan Kaiser setting some context and perspective on the topic in question, then shift over to a noisy Game Developers Conference press room for ...
2018-08-13 11:56:01 +0000 UTC View Post
As you'll notice right away, this week's episode was originally intended to be a Micro feature. But, inevitably, despite my assuming we'd be lucky to squeeze half an hour of conversation out of the topic, we went on for a full hour. And that was when I decided, heck, let's just make it full episode ...
2018-08-06 12:57:12 +0000 UTC View Post
In 1994, Sega released the Pico: a cute little purple-and-teal suitcase that ran on Genesis hardware and promised to enhance young minds rather than rot them. While it was a neat little piece of tech at the time, America didn't take as kindly to the Pico as Japan did--though Sega's little "learning ...
2018-08-03 07:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Back in 2007, Irrational Games wowed the world with BioShock, an FPS experience that bridged the gap between PC and console games with its role as the "thinking man's shooter." With 2013's Infinite closing the book on the series—and Irrational Games as a whole—and still no new Ken Levine game to...
2018-07-30 19:59:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's one that's been on my "dream podcasts" list for ages — a full-length interview with Robert Woodhead, formerly of Sir-Tech, and one of the two visionaries behind the Wizardry series... which is to say, one of the most influential role-playing designers of all time. This was recorded...
2018-07-24 15:11:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, this one turned out a little messy. A lot messy, actually. I think we've done a good job with our occasional excursions into films and other media tangential to classic games so far (e.g. Labyrinth, Star Wars, etc.), keeping the conversation pretty focused on the big...
2018-07-20 15:42:39 +0000 UTC View Post