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Retronauts 142: The Mummy Demastered + Megacat

Retronauts 142: The Mummy Demastered + Megacat

Well, whaddya know. It's another episode about a media property.

OK, but not really. Unlike some of our recent episodes about movies and TV, this one is entirely about the related game… because really, who cares about Tom Cruise's attempt to reboot The Mummy? The game, on the other hand...

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Micro episode 82: The Goonies

Micro episode 82: The Goonies

So… it's not actually our intent to turn Retronauts Micro into a series focused exclusively on movies and other properties that inspired games, with sidebar segments on the games themselves. It's just a coincidence that the past few episodes have gone that direction. This week's Micro was View Post

Episode 141: Preserving classics with Limited Run Games

Episode 141: Preserving classics with Limited Run Games

This isn't strictly a retro topic this week, but it definitely intersects with the things (and some of the games!) we cover on Retronauts. As it happens, my house is just down the highway from the offices of Limited Run Games. So I recently imposed on the guys who run the company — Josh F...

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Retronauts Episode 140: Final Fantasy VI

Retronauts Episode 140: Final Fantasy VI

Hello! Celebrate Presidents Day this year with the President of All RPGs (or something like that): Final Fantasy VI. This continues our Final Fantasy deep-dive series featuring Chris Kohler and Kat Bailey, and it is a lovely piece of conversation about a game we all love very much....

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Retronauts Micro 81: Virtual Bart

Retronauts Micro 81: Virtual Bart

For the fourth time, the Talking Simpsons crew takes over Retronauts to explore the long legacy of Simpsons games. This week, they shine the spotlight on Virtual Bart, which applied the then-burgeoning hype over virtual reality to The Simpsons with mixed results (at best). On this episode of Retrona...

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Retronauts Episode 139: Television Games

Retronauts Episode 139: Television Games

Over the years, we've covered plenty of games based on animated TV shows, from The Simpsons to Tiny Toon Adventures to Animaniacs. But this week's episode of Retronauts focuses on a much rarer specimen: video games based on live-action TV shows. And, given that live-action shows are usually constrai...

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Episode 138: Ship to Shore's Konami jams & NES Maker

Episode 138: Ship to Shore's Konami jams & NES Maker

Two interview segments this week. First, for the core of the episode, I invited Aaron Hamel of Ship to Shore Phono Co. to share an inside look at his company's efforts to bring vintage game soundtracks to the U.S. Why focus on obscurities like Metal Black and Pu-Li-Ru-La? How hard ...

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Episode 137: Metroidvania and the ’90s doldrums

Episode 137: Metroidvania and the ’90s doldrums

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the entire reason the word "metroidvania" exists… and yet, it almost seems to have killed the exploratory platformer. It's the one truly notable game of its kind from the late ’90s; indeed, for an entire decade, most works in this style bore the nam...

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Micro 80: Jim Henson's Labyrinth

Micro 80: Jim Henson's Labyrinth

Ever since taking Retronauts full-time last year, I've been wanting to venture beyond the realm of purely discussing video games and into other retro media with episodes dedicated primarily to film, television, etc. — without altogether abandoning the video game angle. Usually when we discuss tie-...

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Episode 136: Shantae (in her creator's words)

Episode 136: Shantae (in her creator's words)

By my count, this marks the 250th episode of Retronauts since we relaunched with the Kickstarter campaign in 2013. Fittingly for this milestone in numeration, we have a pretty significant episode… well, for me, at least. I've been trying to pull together a sit-down interview with Shantae ...

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Retronauts Episode 135: Spider-Man Games

Retronauts Episode 135: Spider-Man Games

Spider-Man has been starring in video games for 35 years, but outside of a few rare instances, his digital adventures didn't receive much praise before Neversoft brought him into the world of polygons. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Gary Butterfield, and Spider-Man su...

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Retronauts Micro 79: Animaniacs Games

Retronauts Micro 79: Animaniacs Games

Hulu just announced a two-season reboot of the classic '90s 'toon Animaniacs, so there's never been a better time to look back at the many games starring the Warner Brothers and their Warner sister, Dot. On this episode of Retronauts Micro, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Chris Antista as the cr...

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Episode 134: Mega Man X

Episode 134: Mega Man X

Friends! It's another deep dive as Bob and I convene with Kat Bailey and Brett Elston to discuss the greatest Mega Man game of all: Mega Man X. Handily, this coincides with both the series' 30th anniversary and the recent release of the Super NES mini console, so it's double-relevant. Wow!<...

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Episode 133: Steamworld & Chip Tanaka's Django

Episode 133: Steamworld & Chip Tanaka's Django

One of my goals with Retronauts for 2017 was to get more interviews with game creators and people in retrogaming into the show's rotation, and I think by and large that mission proved to be a success. One of my goals for 2018, then, will be to figure out ways to make sure these interview segments so...

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Retronauts Micro 78: Square's PlayStation fighting games

Retronauts Micro 78: Square's PlayStation fighting games

Greetings and salutations and please to enjoy this final podcast for 2017! (Unless I manage to pull together Monday's episode a bit in advance.) This one centers on Squaresoft's PS1 fighting games, all five (!) of them. That's really quite a lot for a company focused on RPGs. But you'll find the com...

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Retronauts episode 132: Years in review 2018

Retronauts episode 132: Years in review 2018

Hi everyone! Christmas may not come early this year, but New Year's does. I wanted to post this coming week's early-access episode even earlier. I know a bunch of you will be traveling today and tomorrow, and I thought you might enjoy listening to the show as you make your journey.

This episode is...

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Retronauts Holiday Extravaganza 2017: Donkey Kong Country's "The Kongo Bongo Festival of Lights"

Retronauts Holiday Extravaganza 2017: Donkey Kong Country's "The Kongo Bongo Festival of Lights"

As another year winds down, it's time to return once again to the Retronauts holiday cabin in Parts Unknown. And for 2017's celebration, we've dug up one of the few remaining video game cartoon Christmas specials left for our annual festive discussion: Donkey Kong Country's "The Kongo Bongo Festival...

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Retronauts Episode 131: SEGA's arcade history - Into the ’90s

Retronauts Episode 131: SEGA's arcade history - Into the ’90s

Ben and Benj and I have put together several episodes on the history of SEGA's innovative and often genre-defining arcade creations, and I had intended to put a bow on the series with this entry before moving along to other arcade greats in 2018. But it turns out SEGA made so many innovative and gen...

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Retronauts Episode 130: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Retronauts Episode 130: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

In a generation where games strove to be gritty, photorealistic, and more "mature," The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker dared to be boldly cartoony, and suffered greatly at the hands of console warriors. Yet, close to 15 years later—and with the help of an HD remake—Link's seafaring GameCube adv...

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Retronauts Micro 76: The Wizard with Luke Edwards

Retronauts Micro 76: The Wizard with Luke Edwards

Hi, it's me again. Since our most recent episode ended up being posted a little late, I thought you might enjoy receiving this one a day early. 

This is another live Micro (well, "micro") episode from a convention. The sound quality unfortunately isn't as nice as our Metal Gear panel...

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Episode 129: Inside Axiom Verge

Episode 129: Inside Axiom Verge

As promised (!?), this week's advance episode comes in a bit on the late side due to my travel schedule. On the plus side, the balance of this delay is a really great, in-depth episode on the history of Shantae with Matt Bozon that'll go up in a few weeks (as well as a second WayForward epi...

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Quick note on this week's episode

Hi all, it's Jeremy — just wanted to let you know that this week's advance episode may not go up here until Tuesday. This is a Retronauts recording weekend (you know, when I fly to the west coast and spend the weekend marathoning episodes with Bob and guests) — unlike most, though, it's a THREE ...

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Episode 128: The collectors bubble

Episode 128: The collectors bubble

I keep going back and forth on whether or not I should put an apostrophe in "collectors"…

Anyway, welcome to the latest episode! This was a fun and interesting one to put together, because it was really a free-form conversation without a lot of advance planning — it's a topic all four particip...

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Retronauts Micro 75: Behind the Scenes of Metal Gear (Live from PRGE 2017)

Retronauts Micro 75: Behind the Scenes of Metal Gear (Live from PRGE 2017)

We've given you our semi-expert opinions on Metal Gear plenty of times over the years, so it's about time for all of you Retronauts listeners to hear some EXPERT ones. And who better to offer them than people who worked on the actual games? On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey and Jeremy P...

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Retronauts Episode 127: Listener Mail 2017

Retronauts Episode 127: Listener Mail 2017

Often, our episodes are packed so full of stunning facts and dangerous takes that we rarely have time to give you, the listener, a voice. Hence, our annual listener mail episode: your yearly chance to write in and ask us our semi-expert opinions. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jerem...

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Episode 126: HyperCard & Myst

Episode 126: HyperCard & Myst

We've mentioned Myst and HyperCard in several episode this year, but it's always within a glancing tangent rather than a real conversion. This week, Ben Elgin and I downshift into first gear to take a proper look at these two interconnected pieces of gaming history: Apple's incredibly flexi...

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Micro 74: Metroid II & Samus Returns

Micro 74: Metroid II & Samus Returns

We're not very good with this whole "Retronauts Micro" thing, huh? They've gone from being about 10 minutes long to about an hour and 10 minutes long — 1:12:00 in this case. I know, it must be dreadful to get more listening material than you originally signed up for. We'll work on this in the futu...

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Episode 125: The Final Fantasy Legend

Episode 125: The Final Fantasy Legend

Hi everyone! We're back on our regular schedule, and this week we have another patron request episode. This one hits on the early SaGa games — that is, Final Fantasy Legend 1-3 (and their siblings, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Final Fantasy II). Special guest ...

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Retronauts Micro 73: Monster Party

Retronauts Micro 73: Monster Party

It might not have been a smash-hit back when it released in 1989, but Monster Party went on to be remembered by NES kids as one of the more memorable—if inexplicable—8-bit games. Though the (unreleased) Japanese version set out to be a much more direct parody of horror hits, the extant experienc...

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We're back! With episode 124

Hi everyone, sorry for taking so long to get this episode up. We've been having a weird security issue where Patreon's standard account verification emails haven't been coming through correctly, so we were locked out of this page. That's kinda bad. Fortunately, everything seems to be working properl...

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