A Trip Down Memory Card Lane

In 1969, Sesame Street premiered with a mission unlike anything children's television had attempted before, and thirteen years later, the Children's Television Workshop asked the same question on a new screen. In this episode, David and Rob trace the full arc of Sesame Street's history, from Joan Ganz Cooney's dinner party in 1966 to the November 10th premiere that changed children's television forever, and then follow the franchise through forty years of video games, from the first Apple II titles in 1982 to the Atari 2600, the NES, the CD-ROM boom, and all the way to a Kinect game made by the studio behind Psychonauts. Join them as they explore how one of television's most enduring institutions brought its classroom to the console, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.Read transcript

In 1994, Bullfrog Productions released Theme Park, a construction and management simulation that would go on to sell fifteen million copies and define a genre. In this episode, David and Rob trace the game's development from Peter Molyneux's initial concept through the year and a half of work that brought it to life, led by a seventeen-year-old programmer named Demis Hassabis working a gap year before Cambridge. They explore how Hassabis built the game's visitor simulation from scratch, why multiplayer was cut two weeks before release, and what it meant that Molyneux's bet on bright colors for Japan paid off exactly as predicted. They also follow the thread forward from Theme Park's role in establishing a genre to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that Hassabis won in 2024 for work that began with the same questions he was asking in Guildford in 1993. Join David and Rob as they look back at the little people, the late-night spreadsheets, and the teenager who built them on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.Read transcript

In 1986, Nintendo released a Mario sequel so difficult that it never left Japan. In this episode, David and Rob trace the full story of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels from the arcade experiments that seeded its brutal design, to the twenty-five year old developer who inherited the franchise and decided mastery was the only acceptable starting point, to the decision made in a Seattle office that kept it from Western players for seven years. Along the way, they explore the strange chain of events that gave America a completely different Super Mario Bros. 2, the Fuji Television promotional game that became one of the best-selling NES titles of all time, and what finally happened when the real sequel crossed the Pacific at last. Join David and Rob as they dig into the sequel Japan kept and the swap America never knew about, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.Read transcript

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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