Retronauts - 642: Terry Pratchett's Discworld

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

That doesn’t work. But this does! Stuart Gipp, Dave Bulmer and Desert Island Discworld’s Al Kennedy convene for Ankh-Mortalk. Now THAT doesn’t work. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, I want to be the first person A Retronauts intro to say fuck. Hello and welcome to another very British episode of Retronauts, the retro gaming podcast that sometimes goes slightly askew and talks about things that aren't strictly speaking games, although there are some games involved, and the author did very much enjoy games. We'll get to it, we'll get to it. The subject today is Discworld, the very, very well-known fantasy, comedy, book, multimedia series by the late great Sir Terry Pratt. it. Now, if anything I'm saying comes off as me being quite unfamiliar with it, that's because I'm not that familiar with it. I've liked it since I was a child, but I've never really taken the leap and jumped, like you dived in and read loads of books. I've read some of the books. I used to sort of think I was a big enough fan that I had the, um, gosh, what's that

book, the unseen university, like the compendium, like the, it's like an Atlas, not an Atlas, it's like a dictionary of terms, a glossary of Discworld Things. Companion. Discompanion. This one companion, that's it, that's the one I had. But I wasn't following myself because I just didn't read that many of them. I read a couple and I watched the animated stuff, which was not great. But we'll get to that. The point is, we're here to do an episode of Retronauts,

and that means there's more people here than just me, because imagine how awful that would be if there wasn't. And with us, once again, the ultimate man. But you landed on the truth quite quickly. The ultimate man. Dave Balmer. Dave Balmer is hit. Dave Balmer is hit.

Hello, Dave. Hello there. Yes, I'm Dave Bulmer from another podcast, and I am often told that I'd make a good rinse wind. Oh, wow. Yeah, now that I think about it, yeah. I don't know whether they're just talking about the fact that I'm a ginger with a beard. But they might have been a little bit as an aspect of being annoyed with the world going wrong.

But hey, whatever. And also has magic powers that don't always work right, yeah. Anyway, also with us, after the first time, time on retronaut is Al Kennedy. Hello. Hello. Hello. I am good. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much for having me on. Oh, no problem at all. I think that all of our listeners would love to know who you are and why you're here in a not aggressive way. How did you get in here? Yeah, what are you here? And I'm a logsmith. I'm a logsmith. I'm a Scottish podcasting person, podcaster, I think is the word I was casting around for there.

And I have been doing a comic book-related podcast called House of Estonage since 2008, and since 2019, I have been doing a Discworld-related podcast called Desert Island Discworld, which I will not lie, I did start with name and I work backwards to a podcast. But that's basically a kind of interview show with a book group element stitched onto the side of it where I speak to somebody about their. life and work and the Terry Pratchett book that they would take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. That actually, see, I love that. That sounds great. I think that's the thing we want to do here today, except we're going to change basically all of the things that you said to something else. That's a great idea. Yeah. But what I would like to do. To avoid the copyright problem, you know. Yes, exactly. Let's see if we can change everything so much that it eventually becomes under siege too. I mean, here at Retronauts, we're very concerned about copyright, which is why we often urge our listeners who do download rums to delete them within 24 hours.

Otherwise, they are at risk of arrest. If you ever read a Discworld book, you have to scribble it out within 24 hours. Yeah, in the bireo, you have to make sure not one single word in the entire book is legible. We have to go over every single one of them. And also, what you have to do is if there are any words that are nearly the same as swear words, you have to change them to swear words. That is just the rules. I learned them at school.

Speaking of school, well, not really. That's weird. But speaking of being small, perhaps, I would like to find out where our... Your first sort of how you came to discover the work of Terry Pratchett of Discworld. But not necessarily just Discworld. There's other things like Truckers and Strata, I think it's called. See, I'm not even remembering the name is very well today.

I think Dark Side of the Sun. isn't it? That's one of us, isn't it? Oh, they were correct. I agree. Every single one of you, you're not getting thrown out of any conventions yet. Good luck. I'll just go dead weight. He passes. It's okay. Yeah, I mean, if they tried to throw me out, I would just go dead weight, and that's it. It's just not happening. You need a forklift. It's just not going to happen.

But yes, Al, I think I would like to ask you how you discovered Terry Pratch and sort of your journey into the world of the Pratch. I think, well, the main thing was that I just read everything that I could get my hands on. So, like, I was one of those annoying kids who was like, oh, I've taken out four books from the library this week, and I'm going back for another four at the weekend. And, you know, one of those kids, you know, the really annoying, this sort of Hermione Granger-type little bricks. There's sort of children that everyone hates and wants to die, is that other thing. just despises. Like, if I could have been kicked down some stairs or anything like that, then, you know, everyone, generally, everyone would have been found with that.

But, no, I used to read everything I could get my hands on. And I had an uncle who was very, very big into sci-fi and fantasy, and he, and also comic books, so it was like, an older person has validated my obsessions. That's great. And he, I remember saying. who are these books by these, all these ones that I've got the weird covers and

can I read them? And his answer was no. And I was like, well, there's the challenge. I will scale this, mine. And I was, I asked about good omens. I said, can I read good omens? And he said, do you know who Alistair Crowley was?

And I said, no. And he said, then no. And I was like, what? Okay. but the first discord novel I actually read I'm sorry I've got to interrupt you where you screwed up there is you should have said yes in my opinion

you just said yes I do know that and when he said who is it then say well if you already know there's no need for me to tell you exactly hey I just looked around I mean like it affected a New York accent hey this schmuck doesn't know who Alistair Crawley was Alistair Crawley

you know he's always crawling around everywhere. Get everybody in the joy. Good laughing at this schmuck. Hey, I'm crawling here. Yeah, okay. Sorry, the first one that you read, the first... Yeah, the first one I read was a book called Eric, which is a ridiculous one to pick as your first book. It's very atypical, isn't it, of the series? I mean, it could not have been a stupider one for me to choose, really, because firstly, it is format-wise completely different from... all the rest, well, all bar one of the rest of the scroll books, in that it is a vehicle for an illustrator.

It's a novella which is done as this kind of series of sketches, effectively. Do you remember who the illustrator was for? The illustrator for, for that one was Josh Kirby. Yeah, but he was, he was, he wasn't, he, he's a very, nowadays he's a very divisive figure. Is he? Like a lot of people, a lot of people have said that his covers, particularly, a lot of female guests on

have said that Josh Kirby's covers put them off because I mean Josh Kirby's covers are largely tits and filigree I suppose they are really yeah and as a result they're grotesque as well deliberately they're in the truest sense of the word they are grotesque and wonderful though I never noticed that they were sort of lascivious in that way

Oh, there is a boobular element to almost, if there is a knocker in a book, he will find it. Oh, well. He will illustrate it magnificently. I've got to be honest, I have the same exact impulse, but I don't illustrate it. You know, I just find it. Yeah. And I make a note of it on my wall in blood. But yeah, so he did tons of illustrations for this version of Eric.

They did eventually republish Eric as just a paperback with just a text, which kind of defeats the purpose of it. Because when you do that, all you're left with is the words of Eric, which, I mean, there are enough Discworld novels that you could read Discworld novels for a long time and never have to read Eric. Sadly, that's currently the only version of Eric that I have here. And I'm aware that it's like if they reprinted a Where's Wally book with only the text. in the corner about the scene. Exactly. And that was so good that it inspired you to read many, many more and make a podcast.

I genuinely have no idea what it was that led me from... Because I don't remember what my second disc was at all. I remember Eric was the first one I read. I have no idea what the second one I read was. Did you remember which one it was that really kind of made you go, okay, this is my jam? The ones where I started, buying them as they came out

was at a point where I was like I turned 14 I think and it was which is like the absolute er age for reading Terry Pratchy like 14 is the apex it's the er age for so many things that I can't talk about on this podcast

yep but the at that point he was putting out I think like two a year and which you know what else happens twice a year people gave you a present

and so I used to get whatever was the New Year of Pratchett for Christmas and my birthday and that was a habit that lasted until I will have been probably 17 and I could start buying them with my own money

which I didn't need to wait for them to come out anymore I remember there was one kind of outlet bookshop in Glasgow that would always break street date on Terry Pratchett novels. And of all the things to be like really incredibly criminal about, we're breaking street date on Terry Pratchett novels. But I knew that I could always go there like, yeah, one or two days before it was meant to come out and I could get it in Harbuck.

Smash the system, that's what I say. Yeah, exactly. This was me during the purge going to buy Terry Pratchett books 24 hours before they were due out. Was there sort of a community around these books that you were involved with at all, like online or otherwise, did they have anything? Just the fact that I was a 14-year-old boy with other 14-year-old boy friends. You know, we all just read all of them and swapped the ones that we had to each other so that we could all read the ones that we didn't have. and me and one of my friends made an actual war game style thing

with a hand-drawn version of the Discworld this is before the Discworld map came out and we had hand-drawn version of the Discworld on like a dozen bits of A4 that we had stuck together with tape and lots of tiny little paper miniatures of the kind that you could

you would cut them laboriously out of magazines and things like that, you know. Yeah. And so we called this game Discworld, because we were playing as the gods, of course, we're called it Discworld, omnipotent, omnipresent megalomania, right?

But, yeah, I presume because we were like, well, it's a good name for a game. I don't know. Nah, never take that. Never catch up. And one of the rules that we had to put into the game was, do you not laugh at the pieces? because if you laugh at the pieces

you will blow them all over the map and waste the game. So essentially it's an incredibly stayed straight-faced take on Discord Warfare. I like that. Yeah, I mean, of course, the main thing people remember about the Discworld is that it is notoriously

humorless, straight-laced up and down. So much war goes on in those books. So it could be said, that really what you did there is you captured the essence of this world quite expertly. Yeah, I don't know why

they didn't choose to license it from us, really. You captured the essence, and then you made sure it got nowhere near the game. You kept it in, like, the fridge or something. Exactly, yeah. And I've got to say, it's sort of skipping ahead a bit. How did you come to start doing Desert Island Discworld? How did that come about?

Well, I just wanted to do more podcasts, really, because, which you can tell that that was a thing that I was going to be doing because I was a 39-year-old man and therefore it was my natural outlet was podcasting

Oh my God, I haven't thought about it before Yeah, go on, sorry I mean, it's really our art form Yeah, like the middle-aged man We don't go to church, they closed all the pubs So we have to have podcasts Exactly. And COVID was like just starting, basically. I think I started in November 2019. And of course, COVID was just around the course. Like I got one season of it out. And then immediately was like, well, I better do a bunch more of this then because I'm not going anywhere.

So who have you had on the show? Who have you spoken to? Lots of really cool people We've had From the game side of things We had Kara Ellison We had Hannah Nicklin Of de Good Fabric We have

Grant Howitt Who incredible games designer Yeah just tons of really Really cool people who have had on From the non-gamesy side of stuff We've had like A bunch of comics people With Kieran Gillen was a guest

he was the guest on the first episode in fact he did small gods and who else has been on Corey Doctoro that was pretty good so is it done sort of but they pick a book or is it yeah one book okay it's basically I just say to them

here are the list of the ones that people haven't picked yet okay and can you please pick a book and I always say something you're allowed to do ones that other people have picked if you want and everyone is always like yeah but you don't actually mean that though to you what you mean is because I said one of our guests was brilliant minket who's an escape room designer and that was just incredible fascinating chat

about what it is to be an escape room's in her and and I said you know what is why is you chose this particular book and she's like well you gave me a list of two books on it I said you could choose anything any of them and she's like yeah but though could I really Thank you. I'm going to direct the same question at Dave now. Where did I come to Pratch it from? Yeah, how did you come to love the Pratch? Also, how did you come to start recording Desert Island Discworld?

Oh, right. Okay, now that one is a more involved answer. And it involves time travel. Yeah. When I was about nine years old, is it right? How old was I? Hang on a minute. David is trying to remember how old he is.

I was seven years old when truckers came out. And my mum just read it to me. Oh, nice. You know, as a bedtime story. I don't know if seven is a bit old for a bedtime story. Not in our family. as mum liked reading the story out loud. So we would have, you know, this went on until it was, you know, God, I may have even

been like 13 or something when it stopped because, you know, mom would put on a good show. And so she read me Truckers and I just thought it was just brilliant. Like it was very clearly a cut above. You know, it was exactly the same as like when you first read Hitchhiker or whatever. It was like, oh, wait a minute, hang on. There's kids books and then there's this. Yeah, yeah. And then, so I'm in then.

I'm in, and he brings out, you know, only you can save mankind. So I knew him as a children's writer. Yeah. And then... Incidentally, only you can save mankind. That's about video games, so we're still on track here. Oh, yes. By the way, give that a go.

It's about 1980s computer games, but listeners to this will have absolutely no problem with climatizing to that. I read it when I was... I reread it when I was either in my 20s or 30s, and it totally stood up and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Would it still now, don't know, looks like I'm doing another re-read. Or indeed, you could even go and listen to episode four of season seven of Desil and Discworld, in which I talked to the motorsports journalist Hazel Southwall about one that you can save mankind, amongst many other things.

I loved it so much, and then when I was about 10, the Cosgrove Hall TV adaptation of Truckers came out, and it was just perfect. Was that stop motion? Yes. It's elaborate stop motion. It's some of the most complicated, most advanced that Cosgrove ever did. And it got, get it in you. It's out there now.

I believe they've released it on DVD. It's on YouTube. Watch it. It's brilliant. And it's one of these where it's like word for word, the book, you know. And did they adapt to any of the sequels? No, sadly not. Sadly not.

Okay. But it's fine. It stands alone. You know, it's grand. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is during this, I became aware that this was a writer that my dad was into as well. because I've got me books about gnomes and whatnot. And that's why I was surprised, by the way, of course,

when, you know, there was the idea of Josh Kirby being controversial because I think of him as the guy who did the covers for those. And, oh, they're amazing. And, of course, he's not doing his bawdy stuff on those. I mean, I had no idea that there was any controversy about him at all. I mean, I'd never noticed the breast element of his books. Of course, I will, after this podcast, be going and looking at all of them in incredibly slowly and in great detail.

Yes, I can absolutely. see why it would have put some people off but also it's like it goes so far into objectivism that it comes out of the other side as like it was Al said grotesque and so you it's not certain to me whether he's

being pervy or not is it a little bit like now excuse me and this is a video game reference again so like I said we're doing well here the game it reminds me to a point of the video game Dragons Crown on the PlayStation 4 it had this very over the top like sexualized to the point of like

Oh is that the one where Yeah is that the one where it was like A bit like a 2D game with sort of barbarian stuff Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah And there was a big fight over it about whether this is Yeah there was I wonder if I mean obviously I'm not going to say To people who think it's sexist

I'm not going to say you are I am a man and you are wrong You know that is obviously absurd But I do wonder if it does lean more into that sort of Sure sort of grotesquery in that respect Yeah kind of like an 80s version I guess Yeah. But, you know, that's another very different podcast. Except that unlike Dragon's Crown, I don't think

this could be mistaken for something that's supposed to be like hot. Whereas I think the drawings in Dragon's Crown could be. Right. I think we should say as well that despite what David suggested that I don't think Josh Kirby's art does lead into objectivism at all.

I think it leads into objectifying. Objectivism on the other hand being... Ah, I said objectivism did I? Right. Iron Rans libertarian shit hit. Well, it's because I was thinking of fantasy stuff, and I was thinking of the sort of truth. Oh, well, okay. Yeah, sorry, my mistake there.

Anyway, but just imagine if he did, though. Oh, my dad would get, exactly like Al, a Discworld every Christmas. And this just became a staple dad present. Of course, he was going to get the latest disc, whatever the latest project was. And he had the, I think he was there since before Discworld, because he got the sci-fi ones.

and I think they came first, didn't they? Or one of them? They did, yeah. Strata Dark Side of the Sun, I think, were the first books he did. His very first was a kid's fantasy novel called The Carpet People. Yeah. And then he did Strata and the Dark Side of the Sun. But the carpet people I read was a total rewrite, wasn't it?

Yes. It was not, at the point where Strata and Dark Side of the Sun were coming out, carpet people wasn't a thing. It wasn't around anymore. The version of the Carpet People that came out after he was, disc world guy. Terry Prattie, yeah. He says basically the way

he describes it is that it was written by two different people. Yeah, right. And they were both him. And Strata and the dark side of the sun at the time that the color of magic came out, I mean, those books have been remandered. You know, this was not the Terry Pratchett who would be

Joe Sunday Times best cellarist guy. This was, as someone who was struggling to put out vaguely parodic sci-fi novels that owed a lot to Larry Niven or whatever Yeah, I mean, if you didn't know what they were You would just mistake them on the shelf

For that kind of pop sort of sci-fi, right? I mean, they don't really I have some old editions of them And they really do just look like Old pop sci-fi novels If you're not subversed in them Absolutely Yeah

Yeah Sorry, I totally sidetracked us there. Well, I think I'd more or less answer the question, which is that, yeah, my dad would have disc world, and so eventually I'm like, oh, oh, I should read these. And actually, and this is why we're kind of here, guys, it was with the release of the computer game that I started to really become interested because, this is why it sort of distresses me a little bit

that Discworld fans are like, er, p, ther, er, rinse win in the wizards, because to me, that's where all the imagery is. Like, I just liked the look of that game and it was about wizards and that. So, I like, I like, I like me a wizard. So I was like, right, well, I better read the books. And the one that I read, I took it on holiday with me,

and I would have been a 13, It would have been prime disc world age, was sorcery. And so that, I don't think a very well-regarded one, again, by the big fans of the series, but I was just blown away by it. It was just, it was about wizards, but it was better than that. It was different than that. And I was so excited about it. And I would just sit on the stairs in this holiday house reading it all day long.

And I might have been as old as 15. Yeah, in fact, yes, in fact, I must have been, we had the game and that was when I got that and then I started reading the books there and that is basically me now the only the snag is that I very actually quickly dropped off the Discworld books again because I got my first one which was I want to say feet of clay something like that whatever the whatever the one that was that came out that year and I simply couldn't comprehend a single thing going on in it at all big and I don't know why that is maybe you know I'm doing a read-through now and I'll get there and find

out. Is it one of the more political ones, Feet of Clay? I recall vaguely that it is, but I don't actually remember. Al? It is a bit. The thing with Feet of Clay is that it's a murder mystery, but it's a murder mystery in which you were told at the beginning who did it. And the mystery is how the hell did they do it? And so you're fed a lot of red herrings throughout the book until eventually you come to, well, you know, Command of Vimes of the Antmore Pro City Watch comes to the correct realisation as to how it's being done. So it's basically Colombo, is that what we're saying here? Yeah, pretty much.

This was what my problem was, was that I was reading, I'd got a Discworld book, and I know about Discworld, right? The librarian, the luggage, I know about this. And now it's just going on about a man who is a carrot, and I just didn't know. And it was because I hadn't read any of the watchbooks up to that point. Presumably, everyone says they all stand alone. I bet they do if you're cleverer than I was at the time,

but I couldn't figure it out. So I stopped. I bounced off. And it was only in my YouTube era that I was like, do you know what? I'm going to start from the start. I know fans say not to do that, but I like it that way. I'm going to start from the start because I like to see the writer evolve, not the story, you know, and I'm going to read through them and I'll do videos about them all. And I did that for a while until I fell off doing the videos. But I carried on reading them and I'm like, I'm like one of our shelves through the collection, basically. Yeah. I haven't finished.

Yeah, I think people say about the watch books, well, people say about it just for books in general, you can pick up any one. And kind of, yeah, if you're happy to hold on as it takes the corners, then, yeah, sure, you can pick up whichever one you want. But for, it's a series of sequences. So, you know, you get a bunch of books about death. You get a bunch of books about Granny Weatherwax and Annie on the witches. Well, it's ongoing. There's a ticking continuity all the time, isn't there? So, yeah, whatever he happens to be writing about, he's written about them before. Yeah, I mean, literally the characters age in real time.

Like, there is an actual progression from, you know, 1983 of Color of Magic right the way up to, you know, 2015, Shepherd's Crown. And that's how many years pass in the disc world. Yeah. And because of that, it means you can get characters who grow and get older and who evolve as, people. And they're not stuck in this kind of, well, comic bookie kind of amber where everything that a particular person has ever done or everything that a particular person may ever do in terms of reacting to anything can be slotted into any point in their timeline. You know, it's not like a Spider-Man style thing where, you know, they keep hitting a reset clock on Spider-Man

in a way to kind of say, well, let's have him. back to being he's down on his luck and he's working taking photos and no hang on now he's a teacher now he's made it big in business oh now he's down on his luck again it just goes round yeah i read that too syphine and spider-man kind of journey um but that it's totally not what the disc world is like at all you know a character like carrot he starts off as just this ultimate knife. And as he goes through the series, he becomes not outwardly more savvy, but clearly far more savvy in terms of the way he reacts to people. He learns how to use the way he comes across to people in a psychological way. And by the end of the watch series, you kind of

come away thinking actually Carrot has changed and I'm not sure he's changed for the better necessarily. Oh, brilliant. Like Carrot has learned the city, but the city has learned Carrot and they have affected each other. Yeah. He's clever, isn't he Pratchett? He really is.

Tell you what, he's flipping good at this. The thing that I tend to say about him and I'll perhaps I'll revisit this when I've finished reading through the series, but I think of him as just like a real. really, really great author for adults, but possibly the best author for children that there has ever been. I just think he's an amazing, amazing children's author. And this is why when there are people who are wondering about where to start, I actually think Tiffany Aking is probably the best. It's probably a solid place because you skip over the problem that reading Discworld has, which is that, like, the fans insist you don't start at any sensible starting point

because they don't like those earlier books. Now, my attitude to this is that, yes, but to get to the ones you like, you like them at the end, you've read the other books and you got there in a journey. So if you ask someone to skip all that because you want them to like it as much as you like the later ones, you run the risk of what happened to me, which is them just going like, what's this? Whereas the first Tiffany aching book sidesteps all of that, introduces Discworld properly. One of the main Discworld characters is a key in it.

and it's the developed Pratchett. It's the full final version of Terry. What is it called the first Tiffany Aking book? Remind me. What's the name of the book? It's called The We Free Men. I see. And it is a flipping brilliant.

It's absolutely terrific book. That is like a, that is more directly sort of a young adult book, right? Yeah. Okay. It was the second one he ever did that was aimed at a kind of a slightly younger readership. Which was the first one? The amazing Maurice and his educated rodents.

It just got turned into it. a movie. Yeah, I've heard it was great. I've not seen it still. I do quite fancy seeing it, but I just, I was nowhere where it was about, and I don't have any channel that was showing it. I have a real trouble with Discworld adaptations, apart from probably the first game, they've never not annoyed me in some way.

Well, I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about them, but I mean, what you said about Discord fans, and I'm not saying this to tar them with the particular brush, because I don't know the fan base, obviously. But recently, relatively recently on Twitter, I asked where to start, what would be the best book to start. And I'm reasonably certain that every single book in the series

was listed by at least one person. To be honest, that's what happens when you ask anything about like that on Twitter. True, true. But it was fascinating because my personal sort of experience with the Discord, and this is very basic,

so I apologize. But much like Dave, I think it was the game that made me interested in it, because... It may have been, but what I remember is there was a Terry Pratchett night on Channel 4 where they aired a documentary that had this weird linking device, which were it was like a computer. And I was obsessed with the computer, so I was like, oh, a computer. And they talked about the Discworld game on there.

They talked about the fan conventions and things. And I was like, well, this seems like something worth getting into. But then that night they showed the adaptation of, I want to say, weird sisters that Cosgrove all did. Now, I know, I know, Dave, but I didn't know back then because I hadn't read the book. Well, no, me neither. It's just, unfortunately, my response to that was like, yeah, I'm watching a cartoon, yeah, it's Terry Pratchett. And then as it went on, I'm like, I just started going weird. And it was because of the way it looked, it had that slushy, it looks like a Zelda CDI game.

Yeah, well, it makes me wonder why when Truck, when Truckers was so good that Cosgrove Hall did, Yeah. Did word sisters this way? I mean, I suppose it was easier than, you know, stop motioning the whole thing, but you'd think it could have been better. I mean, Avenger penguins look better than this, you know. I remember reading an interview with them about, with the guys that calls Groval about it, and it was a deliberate stylistic choice.

And we wanted to make it look like everything would be a bit 2D and a bit papery and a bit like it was, you know, you are reading a book kind of thing. It's like, you're plainly not. that doesn't land in any, that does not land at all. I don't think that's what it looks like. Bobby Cosgrove and Stuart Hall. Yeah, more like knobby Cosgrave and

yeah. Stuart Balls. Stuart Bulls is better than why when a shit would bowl. That one, that was rubbish by comparison. I mean, to be honest, that wasn't even the real names. I just oh yeah, wait a minute. Oh, well. I mean,

I watched that. I liked it. I liked the, you know, the Macbeth kind of, I say, allusions. The whole plot was lifted from it, obviously. But I really, I enjoyed that. It's sort of Shakespearean, like, parody of it. And I then ended up watching the soul music adaptation, which is extremely bad, like visually, but worked for me emotionally. I enjoyed the story of that one as well. And that was the first one where I wanted, like, I'm going to devour this book because I got really into that. I like music. So, you know, that was my, a big one for me. And soul music is one of the more, in my experience, one of the more overtly

like this is a parody of this kind of thing where there's like loads of references to musicians and different types of music and things. Well, there's a few though. I mean, I remember I read one as a teenager, which is just nakedly a parody of the Phantom of the Opera and one of the jokes is that Frank Spencer is the Phantom of the Opera because that was who was playing him in the Lloyd Webber musical. That was fun. Oh, boy.

Yeah. Yeah, Masquerade is all about theatre and opera and musicals and so. I'm really looking forward to reading that one again. And it was the first one I ever bought in Hardback. I just, I still adore it. I love it so much. And moving pictures is just, here is the one that is all about films. Yeah.

You know, and then unseen academicals is that here is the one that is all about football. And things like... Get that one then. And there's, there's, with all of them... The weird thing is, they kind of do... It's football crossed with kind of weirdly like, Sweetie Todd Dewe and Barber Fleet Street

or like Lehmus Rable or West Side Story or something that I'm back in it's very West Side Story actually in that it's a class story West Ham story yeah

yeah very much I'm going to football team oh boy oh boy So, yeah, I don't have a particular sort of journey into this, which is one of the reasons I wanted to do this. You know, I wanted to see, sort of get some of that passion for the series and see if it was sort of rub off on me.

But one thing I wanted to ask both of you, I'll ask Dave first, I think. What? What is your favorite Discord book? Why, if you have one? A favourite You don't have to pick the favourite Yeah It's a big question I know

It kind of is Because the thing is I'm pretty sure That my favourite Is still to come You know what I mean I'm not I'm sort of

I'm up to the 90s now What's that sorry I had some bad news About any further No I mean in my read But that's the thing I'm in the happy position Of having

Like the majority of disc world Still ahead of me My poor wife She was a proper Diehard Pratchett fan the whole time. And I remember when I came out of my driving theory test actually to greet her on, she was on the steps outside the testing place. And I was like, I passed. And she's like, well done. And I'm like, hang on. Something terrible has happened. And she's

trying to hold it together and pretend to be happy. What's happened? And it was that Terry had died. And we just, you know, I don't know that did we, we knew it was kind of coming because of his condition. But at the same time, no, you didn't. You know, you sort of. hoped it would. I remember the chat about like, oh, maybe they're, oh, this is promising treatment. Maybe they'll turn it around before he goes. But no. Um, so honestly, my answer is just probably truckers and I know that's not a disc world, but it's just such a formative and wonderful book. I think it's perfect from start to finish, except possibly the one line in it, which I've actually memorized start to finish and which now as an adult, I wonder, may have been a racist

joke that I don't get. Um, right. But we'll talk about that elsewhere. The Bigfell's still him go bang I'm not sure if that's racism or not. Can't tell. I don't know what it's in reference to. But absolutely loved it. And I just think it's really great and that everybody should go and read it.

And it kind of has the added benefit of not being tied in with this giant sprawling series that if you ask a fan, what should I read? They'll bring out a chart. And you should read it as an adult because the thing about Terry

is that his writing for adults and his writing for children is like kind of the same. He doesn't really need to do any tone switching particularly, and he certainly doesn't write down to children. All he does is he stops making puerile dick jokes, and that kind of improves it anyway. Oh, that's a shame.

No, the thing about Pratchett's dick jokes is that they always read to me as if he wrote the book the way he writes for children and then just like leave it in a couple of rude things so that it could be published for adults. They don't feel comfortable to me. They don't feel like that's where he sits.

He feels like someone, because he always cuts away from rude jokes and makes them under his handkerchief and behind his hand. And like, do you know what I mean? I think he's got a way of doing what we would regard as like rude jokes. I think it's not so much that they're rude.

It's that they're saucy. You know, they're a very, they're a music, Hall kind of... It's a bawdy fella. Yeah, like a kind of those sort of rude postcards that you used to get in places like

Torquay. Yeah, it's often about pulling away from the rude joke because you know what they said next readers. It's just like that. And that sort of thing actually is a bit jarring to me. Pulling away. Again, I'm only talking about where I'm up to in my read-through, which is incomplete, but I'm having a lovely time.

It's not, because it's not, I'm not just reading through the series. That would drive me mad no matter how much I loved it. So just whenever I get the urge, I'll read the next one in order, basically. So it's taken me years. I mean, the last Pratchett thing I read was the, no, I don't know how the fans feel about this. So feel free to criticise me, but it was that, you know, Terry Pratchett, a life with footnotes, the biography. Yeah. I read that.

I don't know how fans feel. about it. I don't know if there's any sense of, like, authenticity around it, but I found it pretty hard to read in terms of, like, sad, you know, a really heartbreaking book as a kind of account of someone degenerating like that. But I, I did, I did, I don't want to say I enjoyed it, but I thought I had got something out of it. I think it's a beautiful book, Craig, honestly, because it was written by his assistant and, like, the person. Yeah, and. Wilkins, excuse me, Wilkins. And he knew Terry Pratchett better than, you know, anybody reading that book other than someone who was already related to him or possibly, you know, his agent, would have known him.

And the fact that, you know, the reason that Rob Wilkins got even involved with Terry Pratchett is that he, Terry Pratchett had decided that he wanted a little old woman from the village to come in a couple of days a week and sort of. the male basically and he'd got this idea from speaking to jilly cooper at a party which is just just brilliant um and it turned out that the little old woman from the village was uh rob wilkins who was none of those things and he became a completely invaluable uh part of brachets life and the book life with it was just one of my favorite ever biocrat's life and the book life with it was just one of my favorite ever biographies that I've read is really affecting. Oh, I must read this. I must read it.

It was very, very good. It was good. I remember having tears in my eyes in the car while I was reading it. It's hard going at places. Like, it's really hard to read. Because, like, I didn't, I'm not that familiar with his writings I should be, but I did follow him to an extent. I watched his, you know, documentary.

Oh, God. about euthanasia, and that, I thought, was very affecting and very intelligent and very thought-provoking. And prior to that, I'd always, like, respected him. He always came off as so funny and sort of, I don't know it's sort of like erudite, but he just came off as something down to earth, you know, like someone you could talk to. He's an obviously good person. And one of the things that I'm, one of the things about Terry is that like, as, you know, you'll see this as if you do what I'm doing and read the series in order, you, do see him evolve in line with popular thinking of the time.

You know, there's some stuff in his earlier books that he wouldn't have written in his later books because he improved as a person as things, as he became exposed to more things. And so what I'm saying is that he's kind of proofed against any future thing we realize that we've all been wrong about and should have been better at, because he always adapted and improved and evolved with the times. And so he's one of these people where, you know, when the right wing lots start going like, oh, Terry would never have gone. You can satisfyly say, oh, God, yes, the turf's tried to claim him, didn't they? The TIRFs tried to claim.

And the thing is, there'll be other groups of people with issues that, you know, us three here now haven't thought of. And they'll try and claim him in the future. But I can be pretty confident that he would always have evolved in the right direction because he always did. Yeah Yeah. It's a good bloke. Yeah, good fella. I mean, I didn't really want to sort of,

I don't think you can really talk about Perchard now without at least addressing, like, the circumstances there. But, yeah, I think that brings us to the point of the podcast, the Retronauts podcast in which we talk about retro games. Yes. But, of course, Terry Pratchett was a gamer. Mm-hmm. To the extent, I don't, not that kind of gaming.

a person who played games because he's on the record as being a huge fan of like Thief the Dark Project and well not Thief 2 mainly and also there's a quite well-known anecdotes that's a quote from him about Lemmings apparently and I don't know this because I haven't read it but interesting times the book

Interesting Times apparently does have a reference to Lemmings in the Red Army which is great I didn't know that but he's quoted as having said not only did I wipe Lemmings from my hard disk I overwrote it so I couldn't get it back, which is... Not because he didn't like it, but because it was interfering with his work schedule. Yeah, it's relatable because every year, around the same time, I start playing lemmings.

Like, it's almost like some kind of weird curse. I just get this weird urge, I'm like, well, it's August the 1st is lemmings time. That's, uh, let's do just get on with the lemmings, you know. I've got one of those. When it's Easter, I start playing Chuckie out. Not because of the egg connection, but just because I did play it then, and it's, like, important. Well, Chuck Eags are a game, and one day we'll do a two-hour podcast about it. Hell, yeah, we will.

Let's see if we can track the guy down and get him on. Yeah, I think it should be called Rettronaut's the Egg episode, and we don't talk about Dizzy, because we've already done... This is Dizzy, okay? Now, the games, the Deguild Games, now, they're actually more than I thought there were, but not by much. One more. Now, I always thought that Did Disworld, the 1935 game that we've already alluded to. I thought that was the first Discworld game, but it was not. It was the third.

How retro do you want to go? You what? Tell me all about this, guys. What? It was the third Discworld game. The first one, well, correct me if I'm wrong, this is based on my research in the last few days. The first one, I understanding is a 1986 text adventure based on the color of magic. Oh, my God, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. Yeah. And apparently, it's quite good as well.

Pratchett himself, he liked it a lot. He was not happy with, like, his performance and sales, and he wasn't happy. with the marketing so he sort of kept after this he sort of got the range to the license and was just like no no to anyone who tried to get it but it was on the spectrum C64 and the CPC and you know by all accounts not a bad game at all so

that's one to look into I think if indeed you like text adventures which I happen to like so yes I will be checking that out at some point have any if you played this because it's very obscure I played it before I knew what the disc world was. Yeah. Oh, wow. Perfect.

Oh, wow. I had, well, see, my sort of heyday of playing it, because I was a spectrum person. So my sort of hayday... As is right and good, yes. Yeah, well, I mean, I'll be one of these C-64 deviants. Scum. Yeah, perverts. So I was a specky person, and so I used to get as much.

many magazines with the cover tapes as I possibly could. Yeah. Amazing. Crash and... Yeah, and your Sinclair, I think, is probably still... I don't know people would go, yes, but it evolved into Amiga Power. Yes, but your Sinclair was still my favourite. Yes, but of course Amiga Power was the best magazine ever produced. So, you know, I mean, if anything that has got roots, that has any kind of Mega Power or any is just worth reading, in my opinion.

Yeah, it's basically it's the Pikachu. and Amiga Power is the right shoe. Imagine if they just brought out a book of all of your Sinclair and a book of all of Amiga Power. Oh God, I would be so good. I would piss my pants if that happened. I mean, you can now download

all of Amiga Power online in PDF form. Yeah. I helped fans of Amiga Power. I helped with that and I was congratulated by Stuart Campbell who turned out to be a complete piece of shit so that was disappointing. Oh well.

Thank you for that, Stuart Campbell. I used to like you. Do you reckon it in Pokemon world, like in the 90s, people would go to the hairdressers and ask for a rachar. Like in the same way that he did when Friends was on the TV. I like that. That's good. That's good gag.

Thank you. That's good, yeah. They'd ask for a riteur and then they'd get tasered and die. But no, you play the color of magic prior to... Yeah. No, you're on the Discord. Fantastic. That's the perfect alcohol.

It was on a tape and I can't remember which mag it was on. But I remember Crash were very fond of giving away text adventures because they had a text adventures column in which they would laboriously print out or like put in like what are the solutions to whatever, you know, quest for the Golden Egg Cup or whatever text adventure rituals revenge or whatever thing it was. And... It's not going on about virtues. Like, you know, N comma, N, comma, W, comma.

But we're not enjoying this game, we're not here to enjoy it, we are here to finish it. And so they, one of them had the colour magic on the front. And to be honest, I didn't play it very much. I didn't get into it. And it was only years later when I got rid of a bunch of my old specky tapes that I was like, Oh, shoot, I wish I still had that. You got rid of your specky tapes. Oh, what did you do that for?

Well, yeah, partly it was because my specky broke, and in a way that I would have needed a soldering iron fixed. Yeah, that's the situation with my specky, and yes, it's been like that for probably 10, if not 20 years. But one day, I'll find a man with a soldering iron, you see? You know, I haven't used it for about three years, but my childhood spectrum did still work last time I tried that. So, yeah, it was amazing.

It was a really exciting day. Boxler tapes, just real like proscian rush all day long, you know, and then put it away, just don't play it anymore. Never again, yeah. Yeah. Plus, I had some new tapes then, because I'd bought, like, Manic Minor, so I was just like, yes, mate. But, yeah, that, see, that being a text adventure kind of brings us to throw the next thing,

which was Discworld Mud, MUD, which means multi-user dungeon. Now, this is a thing I had previously heard of, but never actually tried until today. Oh. Earlier today, because you can go. You can go on the Discworld Mudd website, thank you. You can go on the Discworld Mudd website and you can launch it in the browser right there and then and play it. And I started playing it, and I found it tremendous fun and tremendously friendly.

I bet. I didn't get to a point where I was actually really interacting with anyone. Now, if you're not familiar with Multi-user Dungeon, what it essentially is is a cross between. Now, jump in if you think this is an unfair description, but it's a cross between a text adventure and MSN messenger. Or IRC. You know, it's a chat room where you can be a dragon.

Yeah, it's kind of like my memory of it is that it's kind of like IRC, except instead of the name of the IRC channel you're in being like, you know, fun, IRC with the description saying like, we'll just mess about here. It's an involved description of a place you're supposed to imagine you're in. And then you kind of play along. Yeah. Now, because this has been around since 1991, this is

richly written like the prose is so detailed and atmospheric and there are so many jokes and it's so enormous fun and you know what I'm going to go back to it because I had great fun with this now I love old Sierra adventure games

they're not the popular ones because they're not Lucas Arts but those games with a text passer I absolutely love that I don't I couldn't tell you why but there's something about manually entering what you do that I find very enjoyable and quite therapeutic, you know, like go

north, talk to women, that sort of thing. I love that. And this did scratch the edge for me. And the fact that you can role play with other users is a lot of fun. And it just isn't, you just basically get set loose in the disc world and you can just go where you want. And people

across this project for now, well yeah, there are updates on the website from this year. So it's still going strong as far as I can tell. Very, very cool. Get on there and, you know, find some other Discord fans. We've got the sort of rules like don't spoil the quests,

don't, you know, be out of character, that sort of thing, enormous fun. It's great. still a drop in the ocean compared to the next game which is simply titled Terry Pratchett's Discworld and it came out in 1995

on DOS for both PC and floppy disk. Of course CD and floppy disk. If he wanted it on CD, that's the only way to get Eric Idol. But it was also released on the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. Do you know if you tried to play the floppy disc version and get Eric Idol, right?

That doesn't work. Oh nice. In reference to it It was released on the consoles, and one of the few games that used the mouse, the official mouse for those systems. God knows how you managed to that, honestly. I can't even conceive of it. But then again, the idea of playing these games on a console

makes me want to vomit. So, yeah, no, I'm sure they're fine. If you had a mouse, it would be fine, wouldn't it? Well, the loading would probably be awful. But then again, that might be the case on PC as well. No, but it's still on CD. It's the same loading, really. Yeah, I suppose that's true.

Oh, wait, yeah, you can't install it, yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't be heavily compressed and everything. To what extent did they actually install these games back then? I can't remember. On the PlayStation Saturn? No, on the PC, by comparison. No, I'm reasonably certain, and I may be incorrect, so, you know, let me know in the comments if I'm wrong, naughties.

I think this is one of the games that you could just run from the CD, but I'm not 100% on that. So it should be fairly similar in that case. Yeah. It's a point-and-click adventure game Like all PC games were in 1995 And it's by Perfect 10 Productions Who also were known as Teeny Ween Games

And they mostly worked on Well, you know, like Game Gear ports and things like that Before this, from what I can tell The Discworld licence had sort of been Not up for grabs, but the company AdventureSoft had tried to get it But they weren't able to So they just went, well, we don't need us thinking Discworld

We're just going to go and make Simon the Sorcerer now So they did And that's why Simon the Sorcer exists. We let that happen, and now we have to live with the consequences of Chris Barry saying things. Listen, wow, now I played it without Chris Barry turned on, so I don't know about that experience. But I love that game on Amiga. Yeah, but you don't want to go around with computer games where you can turn on Chris Barry. I don't think you should do that.

You don't want to know the sort of things. You would dress up like a classic car. Well, nowadays, I don't know, maybe you'd dress up like some kind of Illuminati conspiracy or something. Everyone is mad, aren't they? Everyone we've mentioned has gone mad so far. If you were on telly and you hit a certain age, it just goes. And you know, we're... But yes, this was the game that was directed by a man named Greg Barnett,

and he wanted to prove to Terry, to Terry Pratchett, that he wanted to make this because he loved Discworld, not because of, like, oh, you know, money. And he offered to produce the design, like, come up with the design for Terry before he signed a deal, which is really unusual, obviously. but it was demo to Terry Pratchett with the opening scene where Rincewind gets out of bed

grabs the broom panel and uses it to get the luggage off the wardrobe which impressed him and so it went ahead and now here we are they fully developed this engine which I'm pretty sure it's bespoke for this game which is a point in click as I mentioned and there's very very similar to Samu Max hit the road which was contemporary at the time

in which it was almost all icon based the way you interact with other characters you play as Rincewind, incidentally, a very nice, like, cartoon of Rincewind. Mm-hmm. We've made to look quite python-esque for reasons that, you know, have already become clear. But what you do is you essentially walk around, uh, interact with other characters, you can either sort of greet them, you can snark at them, you know, you can be sarcastic to them. You can ask them a question or you can vent your anger at them.

Oh, that's right. It's not just talk to. There's like the four icons of how to talk to them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Which is sort of, which is sort of a sam-a-maxy thing, I think. Yeah. But the characters are all voiced by, like, you know, British comedy folks, like Turf Twat, Tony Robinson, and, like, you know, narcissistic twat who fucked over Neil in his Eric Idol and hopefully lovely Rob Bryden. Yeah, it's mostly Rob Bryden, I think. Yeah, but on CD it's, you know, it's voiced throughout.

And to be fair to, like, the Twat, Eric Idol, he does, I think, put in a quite enjoyable performance. It doesn't sound phoned in to me. No, no. And he was a very, at the time, he was a very clear, like, yeah, when you hear, oh, Eric Idol's going to be Rinswind, you're like, yeah, oh, yeah, of course, yeah. Back then, not now, but then. Yeah, you think you're here when you go, Python, funny, I like. Now, so what do you think of this game, Al? Did you play this at the time? I think you said you did. Yeah, I got this pretty much the week it came out. And because by that point, you know, I was 15, I was completely

I was in the cult at that point I had 100% submitted my will to the Discworld Were you subbed up to the Discworld monthly email list at this point? No, I wasn't

The thing is, I wasn't online at this point because we didn't have modems and stuff like that. It was only when my dad got a modem for his computer for it. Back of the day when a modem was a thing you could take out of a computer and if you went on the internet

you really had to hope nobody phoned because if you're call waiting that was it you were screwed Is that what it was because we didn't have that So there was no problem The downside was nobody could call So like there was a time That we've recently visited on my podcast

Where I got banned from chat rooms Because my dad couldn't call to say He needed it picking up from somewhere Yeah So the game itself... I got banned from chat rooms. Steward. Carry on.

The game itself is a kind of a loose adaptation of Guards, guards, in that it kind of features... It does feature Rincewind as your main character, which fair enough, because even... Back then, he was pretty much the most recognisable character. And he works for something like this, because the point of him is to be a sort of like, sarcastic oh I don't think much of that

I don't think much of that sort of character so you can have him going through this whole world being sarcastic about it perfect for this sort of thing and crucially he goes about by himself he doesn't have any mates he has the luggage he's got well he's got an ornate inventory

yeah well yes and I was going to say in this game they use like in the book he has this big chest on on feet and that's just a joke in this game it's your inventory right it's very clever I think I'm very fond of that that's right isn't it I'm not just making it up. Yeah, that's right. In fairness, everybody had a big chest

on those Josh Kirby coming. Hey! Oh, there it is. The, I mean, the one thing I like about this game is the fact that it's very right at the beginning, but like when you start, your inventory is two slots because you can only carry two objects. And then once you get the luggage, you can carry infinite objects in the luggage, which I think is, I think it's smart. I think it makes, it makes a part of games that is sometimes quite odd, like, diagetic. Yeah. I'm impressed by that person.

personally. But sorry, we cut you off. I apologize for them. What were you saying? No, that's quite right. It's a kind of a hodgepodge of various books that had been published up to that point, which wasn't that many. It was only, they were only up to about soul music maybe by that point. Yeah, yeah. Something around then. And so what you get is a lot of stuff that is references to characters from the book. so you get, you know, it's foul or run or it's, you know, here we see death turns up in one scene or whatever. Or, you know, colon and knobby have a spit and cough cameo.

But it's not like, and we'll talk about this when we get on to school two, it's not like even like one year later where they were just like, let's just put the whole damn lot in. Let's just scoop every single character into a big pile and tip them in.

But the thing that kept me coming back to it was the fact that it was absolutely impenetrable some of the puzzles in it. Like people talk about Discold being a hard game. I don't think that's quite right.

Discworld was a dementedly cruel game. Discworld was the point and click adventure version of waking up in a dark room finding your chain to a bath. It is a game which makes so little

sense that, like, one puzzle, and this is the one I always come back to as just an illustrator of the absolutely twisted Funhouse Mirror Logic that ran right the way through the puzzles in Discworld, the computer game, there's a part where Rincewind needs to disguise himself, so he needs to get a false moustache, okay? Fine, it makes sense. Uh-oh, Gabriel, my three flashback, go on. Well, well quite. This time, thankfully, you don't have to make a cat walk under a fence or whatever, but you have to snip a bit of, or cut a bit of hair off of a donkey's tail. Yeah.

Okay. So there is a donkey. However, the donkey will not stand still. And so you can't cut the hair off its tail. Yeah. So you need to somehow restrain this donkey. Stab it and the throat. Kill it.

So what you do, well, you do have a knife by this. point. So, I mean, apparently you can't use these things together. So what you end up doing is at any point in the game where somebody gets hit by something, they go back to their standards. Did anybody get the number of that donkey cart? Yeah. That's happened several times by this point in the game. Yeah. And so in order to get this hair from a donkey's tail, as in Swindy have to saw, partially saw through a ladder which is stretched across between two rooftops so that an assassin climbing along the rooftops will stand on it, it will break and he will fall through into an alley way below. Now, before you've done this, you have to have collected a bucket, some water in the bucket, some soap to make it soapy water in a bucket,

and a scrubbing brush. And these four items, these four items are literally all over the world, right? You can't just get them all in a large city where people might do things like clean stuff. You can't just go Wilco or NFI. You have to go around the world. Yeah, exactly.

You have to literally go to the edge of the planet to get some of this stuff and come back. Nice. So that you can clean the license plate of a donkey cart so you can read what it says. so that when this assassin falls through the ladder and he says to you, did you get a number of that donkey car? You can say, yes, it's, and then tell him what the number is so that he can go to the cops, get the donkey arrested so that you can go to the donkey and it can no longer escape and you can cut a bit off of its little tail muff to use it as a fake mustache. Now, this would be ridiculous enough.

Wear it not for the fact that Rincewint has a moustache. Oh, I love all of that, because that's two things at once. Like, it's this ridiculous but genuinely funny sort of sequence of things. So when you find it, you're like, yeah, that's cool. But also, it means that you spend almost all the time that you're playing Discworld. Just with that death feeling that games give you when you just don't know what you're supposed to do anymore. Yeah. Now, because I grew up playing this, I can't think of this game as hard.

Oh, really? Yeah, because I wouldn't know how to do everything. Did you work all that out yourself or what? Of course not. Of course I didn't. I see. I played it. My friends were playing it, and we were telling each other, here's how you do this.

Oh, that's fine. That's fine. That's not ideal. Early in the game, when you have to get an imp, that's the bit that does my head in. Inps, of course, famously loved worms. so why not like do they okay tie a worm to a bit of string and use it to lure an impout of a mouse hole what okay fine but i mean asking your friends how to play a game that is that's one level of you know a pre game facts yeah yeah um way of doing these things i got stuck at um the the way i think it was the puzzle about how to get the gate pass which required you literally to go back in time to get it.

And I was so stuck at that that I literally wrote to Terry Pratchett and asked him what the answer was and he wrote back and told me so that was very kind of him. Oh, that's brilliant. David, so you played this when it launched? No, it was a couple years ago.

This would have been about 1997 or eight when I played it. Seven, more like. Should we do a dragon chant now? Do you think? Dragon. Dragon. Dragon. Dragon. Dragon. Dragon.

Dragon. Dragon. Dragon. That was the least pleasant noises in all of games. One of the first you'll hear when you boot up Discworld. That's probably why.

It's because I just heard it every time. I also seem to remember we shall overcome. Not being one that annoyed me. Taking aside the actual quality of the game in terms of its, you know, puzzle design. I really love this game's look. Like, I think it might be peak, the point of click for me.

Yeah, I think so. Something that Discworld did that's difficult to explain now, because when you say, like, well, no, I'm taking this the wrong way, what Discworld did was it spent its whole time going, look what your computer can do. Yes. And that's difficult to explain now because that set of words makes people think 3D. You know, or what's the raw processing power? No, this was

this was kind of before that, just before that. And so it was like no, check it out. Like, everything up to like, you know, the inventory, you could resize it. You could just change the shape of the window like it was a window in windows as much as you wanted. It was full of billions of little bespoke animations for every little thing. The artwork was amazing. It was gorgeous this game and it was gorgeous in that that pixelated way you know it wasn't high resolution yet

but it was high resolution compared to everything that wasn't a Pentium PC or whatever it looked to me it's like it's better than Monkey Island you too it's a beautiful incredible looking it's better looking than Samma Max even for me but I mean the Angmore Pork

overworld map where you click in you get a little tiny Discord like Ritzwin going at like Max Speed through the streets I love that I'm obsessed with that I think it's beautiful And there were just, there's constant little bits going on. Like, even just like in the intro, there's this one bit where you're looking at a screen that has a sort of a complicated set of streets going up and down and all over the place.

And death is like hiding behind one thing, and you can see him. And this one guy is coming, stumbling all the way down from the distance where he's a pixel, all the way down to the front of the screen where he's a guy fully drawn and animated. Loads of frames of animation. He's stumbling around and he pauses the third. throw up, he stops to chat to death who's like, hello. And then in the background, you can just see an

assassin peeping out from behind something, and this is all going on all at once, and not a lot of stuff in those days did all that at the same time on the same screen. It was really impressive. I mean, one scene that stands out to me that I've not seen for a while now, so I might misremember it

quite badly, is Rincewin climbing up the tower and out onto the sort of pole to get the lens, to get lens or something, am I wrong there? Yeah, and oh, he has to claim up this, the spire thing, yeah. And death appearing, and I'm reasonably sure the dragon rocks up as well at this point. And I just remember that scene feeling kind of epic. Yeah.

You know, you just didn't do stuff like that in adventure games, really. You know, in adventure games, what I did is I would walk on the wrong street, you'd get killed by a werewolf because it was king of us. But what I want to say about this game, really, like, just a couple little things, really, is like it did well in the UK, as you'd probably expect. You know, it's a UK-focused or Europe-focused kind of a game. And it didn't do so well in the US. But apparently, the Japanese release of this game had been completely redubbed by,

now this is from Wikipedia, a Japanese comedian. Now, I have tried to find out. I have tried to find out who this is. But there doesn't seem to be this information anywhere on the internet. well done the internet so what i'd like to say is if anyone knows who that is please tell me because i really would like that to be known i'd like to have their name on the on wikabedia you know i think that they should be named yeah uh and also i have there's an easter egg in this game that you can make rinse win say fuck which is really funny obviously um it's you have to click on certain

sort of hotspots in a certain area it's quite involved and then he says as i alluded to at the beginning of the episode, he says, I want to be the first character in a computer game to say fuck, which is, you know, cool. I like that. Not sure if it's in sort of character for Rincewind or for the Discworld. I don't know how profaned of the Discworld is. I assume not very. No, that's just, that's just Eric Idol, really, isn't it? Yeah, Eric, God, plenty Eric Idol. Yeah. Why don't you go and make a crap musical? I presume at that point somebody'd ask Rincewind to pay some taxes. See, I don't know what the beef is with Eric Idle particularly, but I'm learning today.

Well, he wasn't very nice to Neil Innes about the root, the ruttles, you know. What? What the hell? That's true. Look into it sometime. I'm doing my dear friend, Dave Bowmer. Neil Inish, it rules. He's the magician.

Yeah, he did, yeah. Out, don't deserve me out. Please don't hurt me out. Out, out, out. Out, out, don't deserve me out, please don't have me out, out, out, out, food. This World was followed up And the next year, shockingly enough. I think that's amazing that this was made in a year.

What, really? Apparently, yes, unless it was in development at the same time. Discworld 2, missing, presumed, elipsis, question mark. Which in America was called Disquil 2, Mortality Bites, and bytes is written like computer bytes. What the hell were they thinking? What's happening there? I guess it's a computer game.

It's about mortality. Well, it's very silly. They shouldn't have changed it. So this was at a time where like anything that was just behind the curve was making jokes like that about computers. It could easily have been called

Discworld modem, more problems. You know, it's something along those lines. Can we think of any more of these before we continue? Something about like a like a, like a, like disks, like computer disks, like floppy disk, well, no, no. No. How about this? Discord 2, DOS boot.

Oh. Like DAS boot. Yes. But also DOS, which also boot. Yeah. Which is obviously, I mean, I think it's rather good, to be honest. I think it's significantly better than, like, that wasn't fair. Like, given that one just now, like, we've come up with some shit ones.

And you're just like, here's one that's actually quite clever. Well, I mean, I do try to rain it in, but sometimes I can't help being amazing. Anyway, yes, the very next year, this game sort of... The thing is, right? It's not just that they managed to make another game in a year. It's that Discworld 2 is of the next generation of point-click adventure game. I mean, it looks completely different. Now, I had assumed that this game actually was aping Curse of Monkey Island, no pun intended.

But it came out before Curse of Monkey Island. Yeah, it was just at the forefront of that. That was what that... Because basically everyone figured out that you can turn your monitor up to 1024 by 768 instead of 640 by 480 or whatever. And so now some new point-of-click games started coming out looking like that.

Curse of Monkey Island is the one that remains with us. My cousins had a Pink Panther one that I was very excited by because it was so high-de-f. I mean, there was the seventh level stuff like East Fincher. Yeah, and what it was, the reason that they were making all of those is that this was basically the first time that game... A modern-ish analogue would be when Stick of Truth came out

looking exactly like a South Park episode. Oh, remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. That was kind of the effect that these games had, where it was like if it was based on a cartoon, as some of them were, it would look exactly like the cartoon did. And it would be high enough definition that they could properly pull that off. And this is sort of a higher-res, a game that has gone for a full-on animated 2D cartoon

look. Now, the problem for me is, it's to that extent, it looks a little bit cheap because they've gone for a quite flat to the animated cartoon. That's the thing. Disc World One was the absolute state of the art of pixel-y point-and-click adventure graphics. And this is the beginning of trying to do a new more high-deaf thing. So it looks really awkward. Everyone's obviously a cut-out thing that's just shrinking and growing as they walk in and out of the screen. It's not brilliant. drawn. It's a little bit weird sisters. It doesn't have any of those

sort of gorgeous little bespoke animations that you were talking about earlier on. Like if you were trying to solve a problem in Discworld and you came up with the right answer, then you would get a little bit where, you know, Rincewind looks slyly from side to side and then he rolls up his sleeve and wiggles his fingers and then does something.

In this, it literally would just be like he sticks his hand out and does a thing. See, you saying that triggered me. me remembering him doing three attempts at magic before just kicking the door, which then opens. I've forgotten all about that.

That's quite fun. Yeah, for me, the change in visuals makes this game much less interesting instantly. Now, I heard it's not as it's not that bad of a game. I hear that they improved the puzzle logic a little bit. But then I've also read criticism that they did the exact opposite. So I think it may be a bit of your mileage may vary. My brother got really into two. And I didn't. I was kind of bounced off because it was, yeah, it was this, you know, I didn't like the way it looked. But this was my brother's game. He finished it. He got all the way through, I think off his own bat. Work did it all out. Took him ages. And he seemed to really love it. So one day I sort of feel like I'll get into it and experience that myself. But that's not happened yet.

They got Eric back to do Rincewind again. And they're sort of drawing on multiple books again. But more closely to sort of reap a man in moving pictures, I believe. I have not played through this whole game. Adal, did you play this one? Yeah, it's pretty much, it's the plot of Reaper Man welded onto the plot of moving pictures, re-sprayed, and sold on. It's death,

death is missing after a terrorist attack. Yeah. Of course. And so Rincewind has to go and find him. Finds him and death's like, I'm not interested in coming back, actually, because it turns out that being death, rubbish and so Rinsman's like what if I could make you movies famous because there's a new

thing that's happening now and so he has to arrange for death to become a movie star and that's basically the first half of the game and the second half of the game is Rincewind needs to become death because there's now a situation vacant and this death goes off into sort of Hollywood stardom he doesn't want to come back yeah and the first person that Rincewind is a to reap the soul of, is death who's due to be assassinated at a publicity junket. And so there's a whole bit of business with the elf queen from lords and ladies coming to life through quite sort of prescient, like that episode of Doctor Who where the Weeping Angels can come out of the film.

Right, right. It's a bit like that. But it does kind of end with the climax of moving pictures where you get a giant woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall building. which I still think is the fact that he managed to set that up in such a low-key way all the way through moving pictures that that's what would happen at the end so that when you eventually go oh this is this is a beautiful bit of reversal yeah it's so clever that they he managed to lay the whole thing out in front of us

and we'd never even spotted it happening yeah it's not as subtle as that in disco two the computer game but they still you get the visual and it's quite a entertaining. But the main problem, I think, that this world two had, not even in the visuals, because the visuals, they were pretty and everything. And to be honest, I didn't know, I didn't know any better in 1996. I was just like, wow, look at this. It looks like a car. It's not to say that anyone's wrong for liking this, obviously. It's just my personal taste. It's, yeah, it's, oh, my God, I just did the YouTuber thing. Oh, I hate myself now. I did that thing of like, it's just my opinion. And, you know, you don't have to agree with it. Just because I don't like it. There's

mean that you wild like it it's fine I don't want to be that guy you know what go to hell I'm right you're wrong I'm crowling here

yeah yeah but no I'm just going to retract that to be honest though I if you like this I'm afraid you are in fact wrong

well it's got it's got a couple of good bits in it it does have one massive drawback against it which is that the did get

Eric Idol to do a funny song oh God oh thank goodness to To hear that weariness in your voice, yes, I've never found that funny. It's called That's Death.

No need to take up. What's he going to say? Wait a minute. There's a song called That's Life. Yeah. You know what? Has you done a scathing parody of That's Life? I think he might have been doing a bit.

Oh my God. That is a classic idle jeep. Yep. all of them are here and they are completely dead that's death no more headaches no more pain

of the millions who died no one came back to complain but this is always the problem that you get with Eric Heidel is that he will come in and insist on doing one of his bits. It's a bit like, you know, if he came to a party and you just let everybody just don't look at Eric for too long, or he'll start, oh, no, he's got his banjolalee out.

Yeah, the worst, the worst. I remember I had a friend who played guitar and in the middle of the conversation he would just pick it up and start playing it. I'm just like, could you not do that? Could you just stop doing that right now, please? so I ended the friendship basically I just ended it

um I said Discord 2 I mean it did okay in UK as well again it was two CDs on PC it was a big game uh on consoles

it was just one because it had been compressed to the point of complete almost in comprehension oh no it's and the loading is like even worse

uh that's death song that you said I mean it's sort of achieved some kind of minimal meme status, because I have seen it revered a few times. But, no, it's not funny, and neither are any other songs in any other games, okay? Not funny, all right?

The drink song and the Bard's Tale Not Funny, okay? The song's in Portal. No, not funny. Sorry, good game. Can I just, just by way of Can you point? Yeah. I remember my childhood in Brighton, when dear old dad would bounce me on his knee. and so on.

Like, Conroy Bumpus' king of the creatures is a stop what you're doing and call your friend's moment in Sam and Max. Right, right, okay. I mean, that's an interesting opinion. I'm going to write that down a piece of paper. I'll throw it over here in this receptacle. Put it in this small bin,

and then I'm going to use my lighter to set fire to it. I hope that's okay with you. It's where I learned the word Chaldean. so, you know, you're my, again, you're, it's, it's, it's just my opinion, you guys, so, you know, if you, if you disagree, don't get mad about it, it's just my opinion. Um, Discworld Noir. Noir. Noir. Now, Discord noir. A game that I very vividly remember how I found out it existed, because this is not a well-known game.

This was 1999, three years later. still by Perfect Ten, although by this point they're called Teeny Weenie Games. And do you remember those in video game magazines there was a company called Game Play? It was a mail order send-off company where they'd put adverts in every game magazine that were just long lists of games and prices and loads of like, buy this, you get this for free, and this, and this. Now, I remember getting like a 64-page catalogue from them, which is the most exciting thing you can ever have when you're a child. 64 pages of just pictures of boxes of games All the games are out

That you can buy And I was just like, hello That's the 90s equivalent Of what that would What the equivalent of the 80s would be Is a 60 page joke shop catalogue Oh yes Yeah

Take it to school Beat him off with a shitty stick mate Anyway, sorry In this I randomly was reading through it Looking at the PS1 stuff And I'm like oh nice, Gex too nice love Gex turn the page. Oh, that disc world noir. Wait, what? This thing just snuck out with me not having a clue it even existed. And I'm looking at this cover where I can see, you know, Death of Rats and I can see Luton in armor. And I'm just like, oh my God, this looks really, really cool. And then I proceeded to not play it because you can't. If you have a copy of it now on disc, it is notoriously hard to play on a modern system.

there's no Gog version of it nor is there any of any other any of these other games annoyingly enough I'm reasonably sure there's probably a version out there that on a website I can't mention but you know this is this is the way I feel about

this kind of thing is if there's no way for you to legally buy a game and you can't give money to the developers you have no means of doing so because the developers don't exist anymore I see no moral reason why you shouldn't just download the fucker. No.

Like, why not? I agree with that. And the problem is that it's difficult to even do that with this, because you still can't get it to run. Yeah. But if you look on certain websites that I'm not convinced I should mention collection chamber, then maybe then you'll find a copy of it there that you can play that's been pre-made. Like it will boot into a virtual machine that's pre-set to run the game, basically.

so yeah um definitely check out one of those websites which i collection chamber haven't named um discord no i did anyone play this because i i couldn't i couldn't get it to work i i've only looked at videos of it and i never played it el have you played this one i i have to say i haven't um at this point i was at uni and i didn't have any money and i didn't have a computer so any computer those of those are Those are major obstacles in playing computer games. Yeah, I mean, it's a quiet time for computer games, really, if all those times you don't have a computer.

Any computing that I was able to do had to be done at a university microlab. Right. A thing from the past. Wow. And what it meant was that, like, this game just, it came and went, and I would see it in, you know, Virgin Megastore or whatever, and think, oh, we've had a computer and I could play Discworld Noir. I never saw it in Virgin.

I think I saw it on a shelf somewhere, like maybe in game in Nottingham or somewhere like that. Oh no, they had one in Loughborough, I bet that's where I saw it. But like... Yeah, they used to have it in the little kind of spinner rack things that they had in Virgin and in like electronics boutique and places like that. But it was one of these where I remember there was a reason I couldn't play it

and I don't... It could have been that I just didn't have enough pocket money at the time or it could have been that I didn't, you know, my PC wasn't up to spec or something like that. And it was one of these where it's like, but also there was this feeling of like, well, I've never heard of this. So I bet it's no good. Like I just hadn't heard of it. Nobody had told me about this.

I'd heard no word of mouth. It hadn't been in any magazines I'd read. So I just sort of thought, well, this won't be a real one then, like those other two Discworld games. This won't be one of those. Part of the problem with it is that the cover of it looks like a knockoff. Like it's one of the more most poorly designed covers for a computer game. it looks like somebody has had it printed by... Because there's quite a lot of grey on there, isn't there?

Yeah, and the font, the fonts, it looks like somebody's had it printed for their mate stag. Yeah, it really does, yeah. It looks like the kind of font you'd see on the back of a football shirt or something, honestly. It looks like the artwork for the cover is repurposed from a book rather than being for this, which may be as far as I know, I don't know. See, the interesting thing is, don't think even it. Like, it's a

Josh Kirby picture, but Luton is on the front, the main character, Luton, is on the front of this computer game and is not a character that originates in any of the books. Luton is only appears in Discoil Noir.

The original intention of the folks at Perfect was that they would have a character called TEPIC, who is the main character in Pyramids. Yeah. be the main characterist and perhaps it was just like

I don't really like the idea of that I don't think there's an awful lot you can do with TEPIC I don't think he fits a noir set up it is just not no we're not using TEPIC so they made up a new character for it and so and this is where Rob Bryden got his promotion

because Eric Idle was off by this point so Rob Briden gets in America lying on the Sundarja most likely yeah probably and it's not at all good news, because Rob spends the entire game doing a sort of Welsh-twinged American, doesn't he?

Well, he's doing the kind of like, you know, monologues, isn't it? Like a lot of expository monologues, which to me is a joke that, like, gets old. But again, like I say, I haven't been able to play this because it's very hard to play.

I have a copy that I got from a charity shop that I was very excited to play. and it just simply didn't function. God knows why that is. It's like a three-disc game as well. It's another big game, although, again, only one disc on console, which must be an absolute shit show by comparison.

This was 3D, this one. They had actual 3D models and about pre-randed backgrounds like Resident Evil, presumably. But I don't know if it was controlled like Resident Evil or like Grim Fandangor or if it was still point and click. Yeah, I don't know. As I say, I never got a chance to play. it because I'm reasonably sure

it's still point and click. I fell into this kind of technology lacuna where I managed to accidentally dodge it, but I would, I've watched YouTube play-throughs of it and stuff like that, but I would love to have had the opportunity to play at the time because

it's one of the few bits of Discworld story stuff that Pratchit had a direct hand and that I've never had the opportunity to actually experience firsthand, and it would have been terrific, I'm sure. I mean, I mean, Yeah, I mean, it didn't review poorly.

It did all right. Like, PC Zone, give it 90, they loved it. And even the PlayStation version scored like eights, you know, seven's eights. It did all right, which actually surprises me to learn, to be honest, because I had it in my head that this was quite a game that was generally considered not so good. But I haven't been able to get it to work. So I will press on with that.

And I will see if the Collection Chamber has a copy that works. I'm not going to disguise it anymore. Who cares? and maybe this was not to be a bit of a hidden gem You know, maybe I'll vibe with it pretty well But unfortunately, other than a colour of magic iOS game Which I couldn't find almost any information about at all That's it for Discworld games

Now, I have it in my head that there was supposed to be another one Or it was announced but nothing came of it And I had it in my head that it was telltale But I looked it up and it wasn't so I don't know I mean, if they were to make a Discworld game now, what sort of thing do you think you would like to see? Or do you have any thoughts on what would make a good game for Discworld? I would love to have seen something that tried to capture a bit of the Discworld vibe. So it's something that had a lot of text pre-written for it, basically.

You know, the mud is probably the ultimate expression of Discworld in games, which sounds like. kind of crazy, but I'm genuinely I think that if you're going to lead people through a very straightforward story in the way that, for example, something like color magic

text adventure has to do, or even, you can't really describe Discworld and Discworld 2 as straightforward stories given how ridiculously demented they are in terms of their logic. But, you know, they're very, they're linear stories. Yeah. Whereas the

the great kind of expression of it would be to have something like basically Final Fantasy 11, but for the Discworlds. A Discord MMO. Effectively.

The only problem you would get with that is you would need a small army of mods, otherwise you would just get it overrun with Bell ends. What about like okay, I'm going to say this because it's been in my head since I mentioned this question, I have to get it out there. If it were

a single player sort of R.P. thing with lots of heavy dialogue, you know. You could almost call it Discworld Elysium. Yay! I don't think that that format is too bad of an idea. No, that's what I was going to lead on to. I think if it were my choice, that style of, you know, with the dice rolls and everything, like Planescape, Planescape, Torment.

Yeah, exactly. I've never known if that's meant to be Planescape or Planetscape. Yeah, because it's the Planets. Yeah, because I thought it was like Planetcape. You know, like the escape of a planet. It's a load of planes. I go to different planes of reality. Yeah, planescape, torment.

Yeah. Do it. It's sounding as if you haven't played much torment. I think you get on to that. I haven't played much torment. No, I hadn't played any games like this. I played disco-elisium. And I was like, I don't like this.

I don't understand. And then someone told me, no, this is an actual role-playing game. You're supposed to be playing a role. Don't worry about winning. Don't worry about getting it right. Just play the role you want to play. And the gears turned in my head, and I was like, oh, my God, I understand this.

kind of game now. Like the easiest way to get the worst ending in Disco Elysium is to go through it trying to make the choices that upset the fewest people. And the, that's very well put. I know someone who's kind of trying to do that at the moment. And doing brilliantly at it, I'm going to say. But Disco Elysium showed how you could take that format

and be properly funny with it. That's why Disco World Elysium or Disco World take on that jumped into my head. Not linear, but wide linear, I guess you could call it RPG about talking to people. Yes, and why not. And your own head, you know. And kind of why not, why not make it the watch

and why not call it Discoiled Elysium as a joke? Actually, why not just make this game? It sounds really good. Okay, if you, if anyone's listening to this and make Discord Elysium, you owe me 85 pounds, okay? That's the sum I'm asking for just that title. 85.00. Thank you. I think that brings us to a rather exciting conclusion, to be honest.

So what I'll do now is, once again, I'll ask, Al, lovely Al, where can people find you on the internet? Well, my comics podcast is called House Too Astonished for reasons that are, I was going to say they're too long to explain. They're not too long to explain in general, but they're too long to explain just now in that they would take about two minutes. But if you go to house to astonish.com, there you will find the House of Astonish podcast, which is the comics podcast that I've been doing with my co-as, Paul O'Brien, since 2008. You'll find a lot of writing about comics, specifically about the X-Men line of comics. Sorry, I love the X-Men. Well, Paul O'Brien is a terrific critic.

He's been writing, I think, called the X-Axis, which is really... reviews of the X-Men comics, literally since about 1995 on use now. And people say, oh, when will people go back to blogs? Buddy, we never left blogs. We are still on blogs. So, yeah, go and check out HousesSodnerch.com if you want to read about the X-Men. And you can hear House of the Solnish podcast. You can also hear our other show, The Lightning Round, which is a sort of re-read-recap podcast

about the Marvel Comics series, Thunderbolt. On Discworld tack, you can get me at Desert Island Discworld.com, which is the podcast I was speaking about earlier on, where we have tons of awesome guests. We have great comedians, like we've had Alastair Beckett King, with Adelaanour Morton, with a Bethelner Black, we've had Tiernan Deweb, we've had Stu Goldsmith, we've had brilliant sci-fi writers, we had Amal El Mothar, we've had John Rogers of leverage. fame. We're all sorts of great guests. So go and check that if you're a disc world fan at all. And if you want to, well,

if you want to read generally labored puns, I'm still on the rapidly decreasing hell site, which is a bit like, it's a reverse version of Bastion. We're like,

instead of every step you take, new flagstones appear, out of nowhere. It's every step you take new things become non-functional. So yeah, how's to astonish on Twitter? You can get me there. I'm definitely going to check that website out because I love comics. Dave, everyone knows already. Yeah. But just in case they don't. Sonic, the comic, the podcast. You know about Sonic the Hedgehog everybody. You know him. He's blue and he zips about. Well, everything else about him has changed since he was newly minted, and me and my friend Chris McPhile

off of Transformers the basics on YouTube if you ever heard of that. We have a podcast every two weeks that talks about the old Sonic, the original Sonic, via the lens of the fortnightly comic magazine that used to come out here in the UK about Sonic that was based on the games, not on some weird TV cards. It was

oh, so good. And it's really good. And the podcast's quite good as well. So go and listen to that. You'll find it at STCTP.Zone or just look up Sonic the Comic the Podcast wherever you like and you'll probably find it but I'm on Twitter and YouTube as Demon Tomato Dave

and you can find me there I've got a couple of quite good retro game videos on YouTube I'm sure you'll find them if you look for me there and on Twitter I just whitter online this all the time I think Dave's good on Twitter I have to say one of my favourite feeds always something that makes always something funny on there. An indictment of the platform

at large you you there are things that I'm trying to think of a pleasant, polite way of putting this in the child insulting. There are things that you remember. Yes. That no human being has any business remembering. No, I'm a sort of archivist of the... And I find it fascinating. I find it fascinating. I love it. I love it. It makes me so happy that someone is out there doing this. So thank you. Thank you very much for listening. Oh, and thank you for coming on Al Day. Very, very, very grateful for you to come

on Petronauts and do this. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been. for absolutely terrific fun. And if you are a retronauts fan and you want to give some money to Retronauts, you can go on our Patreon, which is patreon.com forward slash Retronauts. And for $3 a month,

you'll get access to the weekly Retronauts episode a full week early. So by the time that all the no-money scrubs are listening to the episode, you'll be like, yeah, I heard that one last week, kind of over it now. you know kind of on the new thing now

but if you pay $5 a month which is only $2 more you'll note you're going to get access not just to early access episodes but to full two full length page one exclusive episodes every month oh my god right you're going to get the entire

like retronauts experience that the other people aren't getting and it's just $5 a month that's like the price of one of your millennial artisanal coffees probably um god I love it additional coffees.

Anyway, as well as that, you're also going to be getting Diamond Fights tremendous This Week in Retro column, which is also recorded as a podcast. So it's another bonus podcast for you to listen to. Oh, my God. And you can come on the Discord and you can call me a tosser or whatever and I'll go, well, I'm not a tosser. And I'll go, yes, you bloody are.

And I'll go, okay, then, fair enough. Yeah, it's a good deal. It's $5. It's the best, it's the best goddamn deal on Patreon, as far as I'm concerned, you know? there are tears above that you can check out as well if you want to be part even more involved in the podcast um you want to even come on the podcast you can do that you know that's crazy mad you can come in here and you can be annoyed by me in real time how good is that so thank you

very much for listening once again and we'll be back next week with even more retro goodness Let others boost Of martial dash We have boldly fought with cash We all know your helmet We know your shoes We know your generals But you said you're worse

For a postman For a parquetman For all the other day, with all the whole whole sail, touches and you pay. We're going to be able to be.