A Trip Down Memory Card Lane

In 2020, two brothers who had grown up eleven years and a world apart found themselves with nowhere to be and a shared love of video games. What started as an excuse to hang out became \A Trip Down Memory Card Lane\, a weekly video game history podcast built on a simple mission: use games to teach people something new every single week. In this special 300th episode, David and Rob Kassin turn the microphone around and tell the story of their own show -- from a college idea to study video games academically, to the Educational Entertainment System of 2014, to the pandemic that finally gave the idea a home. They trace the show's evolution from pure nostalgia to history-driven storytelling, celebrate the episodes that define what the show has become, and offer new listeners a curated map of the archive. Join us for a different kind of trip down Memory Card Lane.
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In 2001, a mid-sized studio in Champaign, Illinois released a first-person shooter that let players blast through walls nobody told them they could blast through. \Red Faction\ was built by a team that had lost the game they originally set out to make, working from the bones of a cancelled Descent sequel and quietly convinced the whole thing was going to fail. What they built instead was GeoMod, a geometry modification engine that inserted real, walkable, fireable holes into surfaces the game had never scripted to break. It was the first commercial game to offer unscripted real-time geometry destruction, and it arrived on Mars, wrapped in a story of corporate exploitation and workers' rebellion, made by a programmer turned studio founder who named his company from a dictionary at midnight. Join David and Rob as they trace the story of Volition from Parallax Software to Red Faction, from the ground pounder nobody believed in to the pioneer Alan Lawrance still believes in today, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.
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In 2005, \Remedy Entertainment\ walked onto the E3 show floor with a stunning technology demonstration and one of the most ambitious pitches in gaming: an open world psychological thriller set in a hauntingly beautiful corner of the Pacific Northwest, built around a horror writer whose nightmares had come to life. What they didn't have was a game. This week, David and Rob trace the full story of \Alan Wake\, from the year of concepting that followed \Max Payne 2\, through the open world experiment that nearly broke the studio, to the two month Sauna Group intervention that rebuilt everything from the inside out, and the May 2010 release that landed in the same week as \Red Dead Redemption\. It is a story about a small Finnish studio that bet the farm on a game they hadn't figured out yet, found its heart in a moment of crisis, and built something that refused to be forgotten, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.
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In 1986, \Atari\ released the \Atari 7800 ProSystem\, a console that had actually been ready since 1984, built by an outside engineering firm called General Computer Corporation and designed to reclaim Atari's place in the living room. This week, David and Rob explore the full story of the 7800, from GCC's unlikely origins as a pair of MIT students who got sued by Atari and ended up working for them, to the corporate sale and payment dispute that left a finished console sitting in a warehouse for two years, to the stripped-down launch that followed, and the question of what might have happened if the timing had been different. It is a story about a capable machine, a missed window, and the gap between what something was and what it was supposed to be, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.
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In 1984, Nintendo released \Golf\ for the Famicom, a game that almost never existed. Every developer Nintendo approached to build it turned the project down, convinced that fitting eighteen holes of course data into a Famicom cartridge was simply impossible. A twenty-three year old programmer at a tiny Tokyo company called HAL Laboratory said yes, invented his own data compression method from scratch, and delivered a game so elegantly designed that the two-click power and accuracy swing mechanic he built became the foundation every golf game since has borrowed. But the story of Golf begins long before 1984, on the windswept linksland of medieval Scotland, where a game that kings tried three times to ban slowly became a global institution. Dave and Rob trace the sport from its debated origins through the British Empire's global spread, the moment a working class caddy cracked open golf's exclusive culture on a September afternoon in 1913, and the early video game attempts that inched toward something that worked before Satoru Iwata finally got it right. Join them on the green for the full story, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.
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