First, Our Thanks
We would like to issue our thanks to both Steven L Kent and to Jordan Freeman of Zoom Platform. Steven was willing to sit with us and discuss his books, and the history of video games for several hours. And Jordan was kind enough to connect us to Steven, and to help arrange the interview. We are grateful to both Steven and Jordan for their time and patience.
Players
If you wish to support the Waffling Taylors, and the other shows in the network, you can over at Ko-fi.com/jayandjaymedia. However, supporting us is completely voluntary and not required at all.
Another way to support us is to shout out about us on social media or give us a rating on your podcatcher service of choice. The more people who listen to the show, the more shows we can do.
Show Notes
This is part three
of four
of a conversation with author and video game historian Steven L Kent, and is a collaboration between ourselves and Zoom Platform. Whilst this is an audio episode, it was originally recorded as a pair of video interviews. What we’ve done is cut the two video interviews into four parts and will be releasing them as audio episodes. But if you’d rather watch the first two parts as a video
as edited by Jay and Squidge
you’ll find an embedded player here:
Don’t forget to check out the other parts of the conversation:
And all four parts of our interview with Steven can be found here.
Part Three of Four
As a reminder, Steven describes his books as
Steven L Kent:
My books are called "The Ultimate History of Video Games".
Volume 1 starts out with Abraham Lincoln and Bagatelle, and goes all the way to 2000 and sort of the collapse of the Dreamcast - or it’s about to collapse, you can tell that it’s faltering - PlayStation 2 has been announced and is just coming out, and Xbox has been announced.
Book two has some overlap, because there will be some people who read volume 2 without reading volume 1, so it’s got a bunch of overlap. But what’s interesting is that I thought I’d be able to go from 2000 to the present, but I only got to 2012. So volume three should come out around 2026.
The One Pixel and Tomb Raider
We all agreed that parts of the first Tomb Raider trilogy are a little overhyped, and treated with rose-tinted action-platformer glasses.
Whilst these games were important for both UK-based games development and the Girl Power movement in the mid-90s, a mixture of a slightly sluggish control scheme, magic pixel based jumps, and the outright sleaze of the Tomb Raider commercials have put us off of those early entries.
Books, Christmas Time, and PSPs
Jay was hoping that he could get volume 2 of Steven’s book read over the Christmas period and take part in Jolabokaflod. This is where family members will buy each other books and chocolates as Christmas gifts, but exchange those gifts on Christmas Eve. People then read those books, drink the cocoa, and fall asleep all snuggly-buggly style.
So what Jay is saying, Squidge, is that my books put him to sleep
Unfortunately, Jay didn’t get to read volume 2 over the Christmas period.
womp-womp
But this did spark a discussion on the PSP and one of Squidge’s favourite titles for the handheld that could: Phantasy Star portable.
Jay:
I genuinely believe that the PSP and the PSP Vita were amazing pieces of hardware
And the discussion on PSP lead to an anecdote about the day that he had a candid discussion with the head of Square-Enix about the console, and a discussion of the Sega Nomad - the portable Mega Drive/Genesis device.
"This this was like a vampire" -Steven L Kent
Community Question 1
Shortly after the first episode was recorded, we reached out to you all
aka, the community
for questions that you would like to as Steven. And it seemed fair to devote one and a half episodes (this part and the next) to posing those questions to Steven.
And the first question came from friend of the show Andrew Dickinson:
AndrewD:
Steven is lovely. Say "hi&quout; from me
To which Steven broken in with:
Hi Andrew!
And ask him where he thinks gaming is headed now. Is VR the next big thing? Are we headed for a console-less cloud?
Which is an amazing question to start off the questions. And it lead to a real discussion about the fact that the human brain isn’t meant to deal with VR.
I think we’ll find a lot less VR, and a lot more AR - Augmented Reality
And this lead to a rather harrowing story about one of Jays old jobs, and a big red button in a server room which would suck the air out of the room to save the servers - but could lead to human deaths. But that was quickly remedied by Squidge talking about almost braining himself on his TV whilst playing Resident Evil 4 VR on his Oculus headset, and Steven discussing Free Guy, and Jay bringing up Hull Immersive Visualisation Environment (HIVE).
Squidge also brings up Kinect Adventures! and a story of when The_B got a little too involved. When he was editing the video version of the episode
embedded above
he included the actual photo. So definitely scroll up and watch the video version - when you have the chance.
Our Zoom-Platform Game Suggestions
We’d love to suggest some of our favourite titles that are available on Zoom Platform
seeing as how they helped with putting this episode together
as such, here are some of our favourites:
| Squidge | Jay |
|---|---|
| Cannon Fodder | I.G.I. 2: Covert Strike |
| D: The Game | Praetorians |
| Evil Genius | Overlord |
External Links of Interest
- Support us on Ko-Fi
- Our Facebook page
- Us on Twitter
- Steven on Penguin Random House
- Zoom Platform
- Jolabokaflod
- Free Guy
- Hull Immersive Visualisation Environment (HIVE)
- Our suggested titles from Zoom Platform’s catalogue:
- Our conversations with Steven:
Music
Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.
- Intro music is Among The Stars, from the Cosmos Music Pack by Muz Station Productions
- Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
- Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
- Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)