Retronauts - 738: 2025: In Memoriam

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and Kevin Bunch take a moment to reflect on some of the most influential figures in video games who passed in 2025: how the work they created touched lives, and what their loss means for the medium. (This episode was recorded before Infinity Ward founder Vince Zampella's passing.) 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 in Retronauts, a moment of silence. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. This is episode 738, and I am accompanied this week by two stalwartes of the podcasting community, or at least of the Retronauts community. Would you consider yourself stalwarts? I mean, I guess at this point.

Am I a bulwark? Are you a bulwark? Would we collapse without you? That's alarming. I thought we were trying to create a podcast that was too big to fail. Take one. There's no load-bearing person anymore, is the idea. But perhaps, perhaps it is you. Who are you, Bullwark? I feel like we get on the wrong foot here, but hello, this is Diamond Fight, and I'm happy, happy to be here, but not happy to discuss these passings. And also. And I'm here as well, Kevin Bunch. And, yes, I agree, Diamond. I'm not happy that any of the people we're talking about in this episode of past, but at the same time, I don't want this to be too somber, an, and, and I, and I, and, I'm not happy that any of the people we're talking about in this episode of past, but at the same time, I don't want this. an episode. I don't know if anyone wants to be bummed out, but also, you know, I like the idea of

awake because the people were going to talk about, they have passed, they're gone, but the work that they leave behind has touched a lot of lives. Some of these people, I had never heard of before I started researching for this episode, but, you know, I look at the things that they worked on, and millions of people played the games that they created. And, you know, they played a part in, you know, people's development, people's entertainment. You can't even know what the games they created meant to different people. So, you know, I really want to kind of celebrate what they brought to gaming more than talk about necessarily what we've lost, because, You know, it's a fine, tricky line.

But yes, this episode is something we haven't really done before on Retronauts, but the recent passing of Rebecca Heineman and Tominobu Idagaki in pretty quick succession kind of struck me and, you know, made me say that we talk about the people who create video games in the context, really, of, you know, like, here is a game we are talking about and maybe we'll tangentially mention some of the people who were involved in it. But, you know, as as key innovators and creators leave us, maybe, you know, they merit a mention. And I, like I said, I don't want this podcast to be a bummer. I don't want it to make anyone sad or make it, you know, seem like we're trying to summon up. sad feelings. But, you know, it is, it is really a shame to have lost these people. Some of them pretty young and often very sudden and without warning. And like I said, you know, they created a lot of interesting things. And some of these people created games that I love

and have spent a lot of time with or other work. And so I just want to celebrate their creations and their individual genius, really, and just to kind of send them off. And, you know, I'm interested in hearing feedback on this at the end from people in the comments on Patreon and on the website. Like, what did we do right in presenting this? What could we do better? Because, again, it is a tribute to these people, and I do want it to be respectful, but also, you know, positive. Because, again, we're talking about these people and their roles as creators and contributors to, you know, just the industry, the art of video games and all the different connections that people experience as a result of that. I don't know if either of you have any thoughts about what we're doing here.

Well, I am, in sharing lots of fun social media, I get a lot of, I'm very used to seeing the gif of Matt Damon aging on blue sky. And I really get the impression that a lot of times when we talk about stuff, people are like, oh, we feel old, feel old. But when we talk about people, we really should acknowledge that, you know, we don't have infinite time. And it's good to think about, it's not, it's not about, oh, I'm getting so old. like, hey, just be aware, be aware that we're all moving, we're all advancing at the same rate. And it's best to think about this from time. It's like, hey, the people who make the games that I care about, people who make games that I don't actually care about, but they still significant people in this art form, they're people. And we all, we should, we should all think about them for a time and just try to, try to imagine what they're going through and the lives they've led because everyone, every one of us is out here leading our own little lives.

and we all intersect from time to time, and that's significant, I believe. Yeah, I'm kind of right there with you, especially when Rebecca Heidman passed. She's kind of young, you know. I mean, I feel like almost all of these people on this list have died before I would consider, like, an appropriate age to pass away. And that's kind of sad to some level. It's had me thinking a lot about immortality as I get older and everyone else I know gets older. Yeah, at the same time, they leave behind some very fascinating work. And, you know, I've heard describe that everyone like dies two deaths and there's the death where you pass away and the death of when people stop, you know, remembering you and stop speaking your name.

And I think for a lot of these folks, that that one is quite a long ways off. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's just a sign that I rolled over the clock on 50 this year, but, oh, incidentally, this morning, I actually, like a couple of hours ago, I crossed the Brimley cocoon line, if that wants to, if that, if that tells you anything. But I do, you know, kind of think, like, looking toward the future, you know, theoretically, I'm not that far away from what could be retirement age. But I look at, you know, the things that I do and, you know, ultimately, like with my videos, especially in books, I'm trying to create a body of work. And the fact that, you know, if I really want to do this properly and take my time with things and, you know, kind of pace it out, I don't know how far I can get. Like, you know, if I want to make videos about the entire NES library, but at the rate that I'm going, I'm going to be pretty, pretty decrepit by the time I get to Wario's Woods. So, you know, it's, um, it is, it is on my mind a lot.

I ruminate a lot on mortality. And I'm not, I'm not someone who is necessarily afraid of dying, as long as it's not a, uh, miserable, painful death, um, you know, when you pass, you pass. But at the same time, I still think, damn, it'd be a shame if I, you know, didn't kind of hit the stopping point with my work that I want to kind of establish. So yeah, so maybe this, the idea for the impetus for this episode was just me looking at the specter in the future and extrapolating that to retronauts. But I do feel that, you know, some of these, no, all of these people, their work deserves celebration. And it's good for us to take a moment to step back and not just talk about the

games, but talk about the people behind them, even if it's posthumously. I don't know I'm going to I'm I'm No I don't know I'm going to

I'm going to I'm I'm I'm I'm going I'm Yeah, so with all of that. Yeah, so with all of that said, why don't we look at the people we want to celebrate?

We've already mentioned several of them, and this is not a comprehensive list of people in the video games industry who passed this year because the video games industry is vast, and I don't have a way to know all of those names, but these are people who, you know, were involved with significant companies, with significant games, who are just, you know, pretty well known in social circles online that we kind of drift around in. And so that's why I wanted to specifically highlight these people. Beginning, I think, with Rebecca Heinemann, who I put as her brief here, programmer, pioneer, e-sports champ. She was kind of the Renaissance woman for video gaming. Like, if you look at her list of credits on movie games, it's startling. And she was, she was in video games. And she was in, in video games kind of breaking new ground in her teens when she, you know, kind of came onto the national scene and she parlayed that immediately into a career that lasted the rest of her life. So, you know, she passed at age 62, but 45 of that was spent working in video games, which is

quite remarkable. And she helped found several companies. She was involved as an advocate in several communities and programmed all kinds of games that you think, that should not have been possible, such as Doom for 3DO, Minecraft for 3DS, what is even happening there? It's just crazy. So she was a prodigious talent. I have no other way to describe it. Yeah, the thing about the 3DO story with Doom, like, first of all, it's a very funny story. I would recommend every listener if you haven't heard the story. Look it up. She's told it in person. She told it in documentaries. You can hear her tell it. It's a very funny story. But also, I think that's something that story is that, you know, I don't think about the 3DO version of Doom. I just don't.

I played it on a PC and I knew it was on other things, but that's fine. I didn't just think about it. But when I heard her tell a story, it really made me realize, oh boy, every single game out there, good or bad, working or not working, everything, they've all got this story behind them. And the fact that she was able to accept this deal, have the deal not work out like she expected it to work out, and yet she still got through it and she still got it done and she still amazed people by getting it all done. I feel like that's significant. I think it's really important to remember just sort of like every game that gets finished and gets released is kind of amazing, you know? Sometimes we get a little jaded around here, especially if you play

a lot of video games or talk a lot of video games, like, oh, that game sucks. It's like, okay, that might be true, but someone still made it, and it's still kind of incredible to think about how many people put work into it and made that game happen. Maybe you don't like it, maybe you're right, but it's still kind of, I think the 3D, her story about making the 3D O Doom to me is like a real sort of like microcosm of like, no, really, every game is going to get to someone because someone spent maybe a good chunk of their life or a real like pressure-filled summer or whatever, six weeks that she had. You know, that's the kind of stories I think about when I think about games that even if I don't like them.

Like, okay, well, who made this game? And why did they make it? And what did they get out of it? Were they denied something important on route to completing the game? In her case, yes, yes, she was. Yeah, I think the Doom 3-O really sums up something that I always appreciate whenever, you know, I'm doing my videos about, like, the Atari library, that, you know, even if a game, game kind of sucks. There's probably a reason for that. And it's always a little different.

Def, certainly in her case, it's never about, you know, not having the programming chops because she was a goddamn miracle worker. She managed to get the tomb running on the 3DO in six weeks. But time always seems to be an issue and the fact that she managed to still knock these things out. Like, what was the other one that really blows my mind, like, out of this world on the super NES? There's a game that I cannot imagine running on that machine, but she got it going. Oh, that's how I first played that game. Wow. Yeah, same. She didn't just get out of this world running on Super NES.

She did it on the default slow-rom chip with no external mappers or math co-processors. Like all of those, you know, the polygonal graphics and the effects and everything, those are just running on the bare hardware. like the lowest spec because they wouldn't, the company Interplay wouldn't invest money into putting it on a better chip. And so somehow she pulled it off. And yeah, you know, I say a lot that no one sets out to make a bad video game, even though sometimes video games are bad. You know, even a company like My Chronics that I rag on a lot in my videos, like you can see sometimes they put some real effort into the terrible games that they produced for NES, and they tried to do creative things with it. They just, you know, for whatever reason, resources, time,

et cetera, just never quite managed to land, or very rarely managed to land. But I think when you look at Rebecca's games that she produced, a lot of those did come up against technical limitations, but when you understand the technology that she was working with, the constraints that she worked against, and the fact that she was pretty much, you know, coding these things solo, it's really remarkable. Like, she really did incredible things. And, you know, on top of that, I did have the opportunity to meet her in person once. And I was struck by the fact that despite her talent experience, just how deeply she was involved in the video games industry. She was very humble, very kind, very generous with her time. And the way I met her was because she

kind of reached out to me. I put together a retrospective video on, and this was all kind of covered in the Retronauts episode where I interviewed her. She's like 2018. But I put together a video on RPM racing for Super NES, which is not a good racing game, but, you know, it does some weird technological things. Like I started digging into it and discovered, this game runs in the Super NES's high-res mode that you, like one of the very rare esoteric special hardware modes that no one used. Like this is one of a handful of games, maybe the only game released in the U.S. that actually runs. in that mode. And it extremely, like, greatly limits the colors available on screen, but it bumps up the resolution.

So it looks, it kind of looks like, you know, a PC or Macintosh game from that era, as opposed to a Super NES game. And maybe that's not a coincidence because, as I found out, she really liked programming for the Super NES because it was essentially the same chip, like the same architect. texture as, I believe, the Apple 2FX, there was one model of Apple 2, or really late release model that was amped up and superpowered. The 2GS, maybe? 2GS, that's it, yeah.

She used that as, like, her development tool for programming super NES games because it was very portable. So, you know, maybe that's not a coincidence. But anyway, I put together that video, and the same day, she showed up in my YouTube comments. I have no idea how she found this video, but she just, you know, posted a few things to clarify and said, you know, I'd be happy to talk more about this. So I reached out and connected and said, yeah, you know, if you're a GDC or an event that I'm at, I'd love to interview you. And as it turned out, she was going to Portland Retro Gaming Expo. So she was willing to

sit in and just talk about her career and talk about, you know, the specifics of what she did in RPM racing and why it turned out that way. And, you know, RPM racing was the foundation of rock and roll racing by Blizzard, which I believe everyone agrees is an all-time classic for Super NES. So it was kind of like the foundation there. But she taught herself Japanese so that she could read the development, like the dev kit SDKs for the Super Famicom. Because Nintendo hadn't made that available for Western developers by the time she started programming, RPM racing, I think that might have been the first, I think that was the first super NES game released that was developed by an American or a Western studio. So she was looking at, you know, Super NES pre-release, like Super Famicom documentation, taught herself to read Japanese so that she could program. And through all of that, came across this like crazy high-res mode. there was a very small ROM chip, not a lot of memory, so that was kind of the conclusion

she came to was like, this is how it should work. And, you know, given those constraints, that game is a miracle. Like, it should not, it's weird and different and like no other super NES game. But that's because she was just improvising and winging it with documentation in an unfamiliar language. And that is kind of, that's kind of the definitive, uh, Rebecca Heinemann story, really. Just someone who said, I'm going to do this. And even though it should not have been something that was doable, no one should have tried it. She did it anyway. Uh, you know, again, Minecraft on 3DS. Unbelievable. Um, but I mean, that's, that's kind of how her career started. She was, um, I believe, I'm trying to remember.

in the interview, I think she basically said she was not in a great home situation. And so she and a friend went on a road trip to compete in a space invaders tournament. And this was 1980. And she just, you know, went because she liked video games. She loved Space Invaders and thought this would be fun. And didn't expect anything from it. It ended up winning the competition. So she became the first national video games tournament e-champ, you know, sports champ. And she immediately parlayed that into writing strategy guides, into writing columns for Electronic Games magazine. And from there, she got into programming when people realized, oh, this kid's really good at programming. And at age 20, she helped found the company Interplay, which would go on to create,

you know, the likes of the Bard's Tale and, you know, additionally, things like an underpowered super Nias port of out of this world. So, you know, she accomplished a lot by the time she was 20. That's unbelievable. And then, you know, 12 years later, she left interplay to found logic wear and kind of just jumped around and started her own company, accompanied. And companies. and did all kinds of freelance programming and was just kind of omnipresent. And, yeah, if there's a game that you like and you've played, there's a chance that Rebecca Heineman had a hand in it. Like I said, our Moby List Credit, Moby Games list of credits is extensive.

It's crazy. Yeah, her name pops up all the time whenever I'm researching stuff from the early 80s, just because of how prolific she was. You know, I found coverage of that Space Invaders tournament, like, very contemporary coverage, and, yeah, I found some of her columns, some of her writings in general. And, yeah, she, like, she wrote a couple games for Avalon Hill for the 2600. I don't think she finished either of them before she had left the company, but the fact that she was, what, 17 or 18, you know, writing retail products for, uh,

for a console that was very popular at the time. Very, very impressive. I feel like she's one of those people that didn't peak early because she just kept hitting new peaks over and over again. I'm not even sure what you would consider peak height of. I mean, the things that she has credits for, it's not just like programming, but also design. She was the designer and the map layout creator for Bardstale 3,

which is, you know, I think kind of regarded as the high point of that series, there's all kinds of credits for emulator. So it's things like a super NES emulator in Pitfall the Lost Expedition for PS2GEN systems, I guess because she knew that hardware so well, she could create emulators for, you know, later generation platforms. just, you know, just incredible stuff. And it's probably worth mentioning that she was married to Janel Jaquase, who was also a remarkable designer who had her hand in all kinds of stuff. And she was, she passed sadly last year. And the last year of Rebecca's life, you know, I kind of followed her on social media. It was, it seemed pretty rough, like just set back after setback and she um she passed a cancer which was pretty quick onset and once it was detected you know she she tried to treat it but it just you know just didn't work out so it was like a

month where between her discovering i have cancer and you know the the final message um but yeah her her wife was also like they were the kind of the the powerhouse team of video games, especially if you love, you know, computer RPGs. Yeah, I know Janelle was involved with Colico. She was involved with Dungeons and Dragons, Quake, Age of Empires, like, just between the two of them. They worked on so many different projects over the decades. I feel like they were about as close to royalties you're going to get outside of, like,

the Sierra Online Williams. A couple. But again, despite all of that, she was just such a nice person, like, very, very good-natured, good-humored, friendly. You know, she seemed very unpretentious about herself. Her nickname was Burger Becky, because when Interplay first started, they had no, like, they weren't drawing salaries as executives. So her solution to staying fed and, you know, being an efficient coder was to buy a bunch of hamburgers, stick them in her desk drawer, and eat them over the course of, like, weeks, which seems shockingly unhealthy, like just the worst thing you could imagine. But remember, she was a 20-year-old programmer. So I think, you know, for that mindset, food. food safety is less important than just being efficient and getting a lot of work done and making this business work.

So that just became her kind of calling card, and she leaned into it. She owned it. That was, you know, she credited herself as burger in many games for quite a while just because she wasn't a fan of her birth name, birth identity. And in 2003, she came out as transgender. and became, you know, started using the name Becky. And, you know, that's kind of when burger faded. But, but, you know, for like 15 years in there, this little quirky thing that she did when she was helping to establish interplay just became kind of her calling card as she kind of grappled with her identity and kind of discovered who she was. So just a really fascinating and, again, prodigiously talented person. And it's really sad to, like genuinely, sad to have lost her.

And, you know, just she was a great storyteller and had so many amazing anecdotes. Just like a person who was kind of there almost from the start of the PC games industry. So another, another recent passing that is, certainly with talking about a very high Another recent passing that is certainly with talking about a very high profile creator, although he hadn't done much in the past decade or so that was visible, was Tominobu Idaqaki, formerly of Team Ninja, Tecmo, the designer of Dead or Alive. You know, in my time in the Games Press, 2003 to 2017, say, he was a fixture. Like, he was the kind of person that we wrote a lot of headlines about because he was really good at saying things that would get people's attention and would, you know, would merit headlines. And Ida Gaki's career coincided a big part of it with that period where everyone in the West was wringing their hands and saying, oh, no, has Japan lost the plot? why can't Japanese developers make good video games anymore, which, you know, that's its own

problem right there. But he was, he would kind of, I think, parlayed that into publicity for his work. And, you know, he kind of turned that into a pillar of his own business by developing exclusively for a while for Xbox platforms, which, like, who else in Japan? Japan did that. Like, no one likes Xbox over there. So that was, you know, kind of him putting his money where his mouth was saying, I'm focused on appealing to Western gamers, you know, people who play the games that are popular in, or the systems that are popular in Japan can have ports of my games. But the real thing, you know, running on the real iron, that's on Xbox, Xbox 360. And, you know, that alone was, was quite remarkable. But he passed. I guess it wasn't actually suddenly, but it wasn't known to the general public until very recently when, you know, there was a Facebook post, I think, announcing that he had passed. And then, you know, some more information was shared by my former colleague. Actually, current colleague.

He works with me at Limited Run Games. James Milkey, who had, you know, covered a lot of Itagaki's games in his time in the press. And, you know, as a result of that, they became. close friends. And it turns out Idigaki had been ill for a while. And so his passing was not a shock to the people who knew him and were close to him. And he had sort of prepared himself for it. But he was very private about it. So it's not like anyone outside of his immediate circle knew about it. So, So, you know, his passing came as quite a surprise. And there were a lot of, you know, tributes and retrospectives and just memorials to him when he

passed. I believe that was in September, October of this year. I actually did not put the date down. But he was very, you know, relatively very young, 58 years old. My wife would consider that young. She works with old folks. Sure. No, I mean, my in-laws are both in their mid-upor 80s.

So, yeah, it's a, and, you know, they're still taking along. So 58 is very young. Yeah, he, I'm looking up his credits in particular, like a lot of what he worked on and what he's known for are his design and production work on the Dead or Alive and the Ninja Guide and Revival series. really seems like he was sort of the guy who pushed both of those into relevance. And I would argue they are probably the most relevant Tecmo had been

in some time at that point. Like, yeah, they had Tecmo Bowl. They had Ninja Guide, but I feel like both of those just sort of petered out when the NES went out of production. Yeah, Techmo, there wasn't really much to say about them during the 16-bit

era. Like, I can't think of games that anyone said, oh, that That's a must-have from Tecmo on Super NES. I mean, they certainly published games, but I think probably their best-known Super NES game would be the Ninja Guidance trilogy, which was just slightly tweaked NES games. And it wasn't even like a Super Mario All-Stars sort of situation where they totally redrew everything and reprogramed it.

It was more or less just like, here's the original games with an extra color or two. Pretty big disappointment. There was also Tecmo's Secret of the Stars, which was really quite a dreadful RPG, just super dated and not that good. So they were really kind of, they'd pretty much lost the plot, I would say. They'd fallen from grace. And Itagaki was really, I would say, largely responsible for making Tecmo relevant again, making the company big enough that it. They acquired Koe, right? It wasn't the other way around. It's a merger? I never know how it works. A merger, yeah. But, you know, Koe is, I feel like Koe is just a company that's always going to be there.

Like they are a fixture of Japanese gaming, especially in the PC side. So, you know, for Techmo 2 have become big enough that it would be merged with a powerhouse like co-A as opposed to subsumed by. Like, you know, that says quite a bit on its own. And his departure from Tecmo basically precedes the merger almost exactly. Like after he left, that's when the merger happened. So he was, he and his work was very much a part of Tecmo being as big as it was for as long as it was. And to go back to what you said earlier, I really need to just hammer home.

I don't know if people understand how unpopular the, Xbox was in Japan, especially the very first Xbox. You know, it really didn't make an impact at all. And the fact that he focused on, you know, there are live games and the Ninja Guide games. And, you know, those games eventually came to PlayStation. But still, they were developed for and intended to be made for the Xbox. And that's, that's kind of a remarkable, like, I don't care what you think statement to make, which is, you know, a very bold, very bold position taken, you know, when you're selling video games for profit. But he made it work. And the fact that his, um, his kind of personality and his sort of reputation sort of grew and grew over time.

And, you know, as he mentioned in the press, I think it's kind of, I think it was very beneficial to him and also to other people around him that he would sort of make these statements that, you know, it wasn't like he was like performing like a rock star, but like he very much had like a rock star vibe to him. And he would get a lot of press. He would get a lot of attention. the thing I think about the most is he had a sort of rivalry going on with Khatsuhiro Harada over the creative Tekken and Izzaki was very vocal

about making fun of Tekken or dismissing Tekken is not like not worthy of attention or whatever but he still talked about all the time and so in a way he made more people think about Tekken in calling attention to it almost like a almost like a heel you know in the wrestling

in the wrestling business you know like he was he wasn't actually a villain but he's like in making fun of Tekken, he essentially got more people to think about Tekken, I think. And I know the two of them had a sort of friendship over time, and Harada had certainly a lot to say when Itagaki passed. So, you know. Yeah, that might be the first and only instance I can think of where a truly long-form tweet made sense. Like, that was a whole, that was a whole, like, feature article that Harada wrote.

and, you know, that would not have worked in at 140 or 280 characters at a time. Yeah, not even Japanese. Yeah, my, my understanding is that as a human being. Yeah, my understanding is that Itigaki was actually pretty mellow in person, as a human being, and that he put on, like, the persona of Ida Gaki when he was, you know, on social media or talking to the press, but that didn't really represent who he was, but he felt that his job as producer was not just to make games, but also to sell them. And to sell them, like his approach to salesmanship was to be provocative in a way that you don't see. in, you know, Japanese business, really, where, I mean, my experience is that Japanese businesses

try to create a little bubble around themselves where they never mention or acknowledge the existence of other entities. Partly, I think, out of, you know, respect and privacy, but also fear of litigation, I, you know, I'm not an expert on the culture, so I can't really speak to exactly why this is the case, but certainly I have discovered in my time working with game companies to write about their products and their histories, as opposed to being someone in the press, that I'm much more limited in what I can say, because they're like, well, you know, please contact so-and-so, this person who used to work here 20 years ago to see if they're okay being mentioned in the context of an article about the game that they created.

like I think it's okay. This is a, you know, it's on the record. It's a fact. But that is just, you know, the level of caution that you see. And Itigaki did not care. He would, you know, talk about other companies. He loved to drag Harada and Tekken. And, you know, I think that came my impression just, you know, from what Harada said and some other sources, is that he genuinely saw a lot in Tekken. you know, that challenged Dead or Alive, which Dead or Alive was kind of Tecmo's comeback product, the original, and it was designed as a way to compete with Virtua Fighter. And Tekken was, you know, Namco's answer to Virtua Fighter, because Sega and Namco are like the true rivals. Sega Nintendo, whatever, no. Sega and Namco were, you know, in the 80s, they were the two companies that were pushing the bleeding edge of arcades and arcade tech. And so, you know, when Namco came out with its take on Virtua Fighter, that was kind of a big deal. And, you know, I think, I think I think Iigaki, he had to have been aware of, you know, that relationship, the, you know, just the, the history there. And this was kind of his way of inserting himself into that conversation and making sure that dead or alive was always seen. And he did it, you know, as you say, as a. heal in a way that I think spoke to the American audience he was trying to cultivate more so

than the Japanese audience. I don't know how that kind of provocative behavior is seen over there, Diamond. Maybe you can speak more to that. I mean, I just think if you get press, if you're getting press as an individual, that's kind of remarkable because I don't think you get, you get, you see that much happen around here. It's very much, you know, a lot of company spokespersons and you see some interviews sometimes, but the Western press, especially during this era, was very much, you know, driven by, you know, the early days of social media.

Oh, someone said this. Oh, someone said this. Someone was photographed for Tokyo Game Show. And I think, when I think of the other developers who sort of became outsized personalities when they would go to these events. I'm thinking about like, um, negotiate Sega, you know, how he morphed from, you know, the Super Monkey Ball guy who is just, you know, a regular business guy into the,

most tan man alive, you know, and he started dressing differently. Or Eganashi, he would show up at the Castlevania Men's wearing the big hat and carrying the whip. Like, I think Ithaghi sort of just did that, you know, with a little less, a little less props, but he had, um, he made up for it by by sort of speaking his mind and, um, and get his people attention. And sort of to bring a full circle, I think, when we think about kind of his last big project, which was a Wii U exclusive, you know also a very late Wii exclusive we should add it was 2015 so Wii was already you know already heading out the door and you know that game sort of became notorious just because of that reason alone and now it's it's probably impossible to afford at this point it's too bad because I really the more you hear about it the more I want to try it I'm pretty sure Diffle's third the one we're talking about yeah it was like um you had to like order it online specifically at least in the West. That sounds familiar.

Yeah, it was hard to come by. And basically, if you didn't pre-order it, you weren't getting a copy. So the price on it skyrocketed immediately, which, of course, you know, that didn't do him in his studio any good, Studio Valhalla that he established after leaving Tecmo. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's quite true to say he didn't use props because his his gimmick was sunglasses, which he always wore when he was in any situation where he might be associated with games. And, you know, again, sunglasses are not standard fair in Japan. Like, if you are wearing sunglasses, you're probably either a foreigner or Yakuza or, you know, up to something shady. And he wore them not in the sense of, I am a gangster, but just like, I am cool, I am mysterious.

And, you know, when you see the photos of him without sunglasses, he looks really different. Like, oh, he's just got normal eyes. There's not scrambled eggs or something back there. But that was just kind of his public facade, really, was the unflappable, imperious, you know, launching proclamations about the greatness of his games and the inferiority of Tekken. So, yeah, he made himself quite a personality, and I think it worked, you know, like when I remember when the original Ninja Guideon launched on Xbox, and it was a pretty big deal. It was, it was an action game in a, of a style that just hadn't really existed before. It translated the, the ferocious difficulty of the NES Ninja Guideon games into a 3D space. that was much more, I don't want to say mature, but, you know, emrated, you know, a lot of blood, a lot of gore. And also graphically just really showcased what the original Xbox could do.

It was one of the best-looking games that had ever existed to that point. And really, you know, really a showcase for the hardware and the kind of thing that you had to have an Xbox if you wanted to play it. So it was great promotion for Microsoft, and, you know, they loved, they loved Itagaki. Like, I've read that he was basically treated like royalty there because, I mean, he was doing so much for the system. And he wasn't just doing so much for the system, but also he was a prominent Japanese game developer vocally promoting the system, which, you know, they desperately needed that sort of organic hype in Japan because, the, you know, they sink a ton of money, Microsoft, into breaking into Japan when the Xbox first launched, and it did nothing for them. It was, you know, just clink, empty, like the sound of a rock and a tin can shaking, just terrible. And he had, you know, he brought a level of

authenticity to Xbox that they really, really needed. You know, the, like I said, He hasn't really, hadn't really done much in the past decade. As, you know, once Ninja, or sorry, Devil's Third came out, he not so much left Valhalla studios. It just kind of dissolved, didn't produce anything. And he started a smaller studio called Ida Gaki Games and was working on something, but we'll probably never know what that was. You know, his final message that he prepared before he passed, he apologized to fans for not

delivering a game. So I think he felt a lot of pressure in that sense, but it sounds like his health issues really interfered with his ability to be productive and to lead studios. I feel like we should also mention that, you know, his departure from Tecmo was not entirely on good terms. There were lawsuits that flew back and forth, some over them withholding pay and bonuses, and also a subordinate sued him for sexual harassment, although the courts acquitted him. So I don't know the details there and don't want to get into it. But, you know, it did certainly put a cloud over him. Just, I feel like, you know, another thing you don't do in Japanese business, really in any business, but especially in Japan, is sue your employer. And that is that is exactly what he did as he left Techmo. So, and it's

I tried reading up on this, and it sounds like he kind of spearheaded almost like a class action case against Tecmo. So, you know, I'm sure they were really happy to see him leave the door, you know, head out the door and start his own company. But it does seem like, you know, his career after leaving Tecmo never quite found the footing that he had had at Tecmo. And I'm sure it's, you know, just the difference between being a creative at a company that has an established structure, business, et cetera, and having to establish all of those things yourself while also still being creative. Like, that's, it's not easy. It's a near impossible task. So, um, kind of unfortunate. But there's no denying that, you know, for, for quite a while, he was one of the personalities in video gaming. And, you know, he, he, he knew exactly how to play the room and to draw attention to himself and to his games. So I'm going to jump ahead to one that Kevin, I believe, you put on the list, Carl Mueller, Jr.

Yeah. So Mueller, he passed away back in July at the age of 52, according to a post, his sister made. He was known primarily in the sort of in television homebrew community. he developed one of the very first in television emulators back in the 90s when I believe he might have been still in high school or certainly early on in college that was called I believe in television for PC

and he also developed similar ones for NES and Game Boy Color hardware down the line after that but you know in a funny coincidence Rebecca Heineman also developed in television emulators, didn't she? Or was that Activision? Something with a vision in it. She did the Atari

2600 emulator for Activision Anthology, I believe. Okay. So I guess it's not that big a coincidence. Never mind. Sorry. I got the visions confused. It happens to us all. At least no one's getting involved in the Klico Vision right now.

But what was a very interesting way? That's true. That's true. We've covered all our bases. No microvision developers, though. So we're okay there. But what was interesting about this is that he got some support from the folks who used to work at Mattel Electronics and who had gotten the rights to the Intellivision Library and hardware and everything when they were forming up Intellivision Productions. And as such, they used his emulator, you know, basically hired him in to some degree or another. Basically, I think it's a contractor for the original Intellipack.

downloads that they put out. And then in 1988, the Intellivision Lives collection and followed up with the Intellivision Rocks collection a couple of years later, those used work that he had done for emulation. So he was very much involved in that sort of early era of revivals and emulation of, you know, early 70s, 80s video gaming. Was he involved with Blue Sky Rangers at all? Yeah, that was the group that had picked up the Intellivision production stuff. Yeah, so he was working with that on this. Okay, cool. Like, he was too young to have worked at the Tell back in the day, but he was an enthusiast of the Intellivision.

Basically, to the end, in the 2000s and 2010s, he started working on homebrew games for the Intellivision. So he did really, really top-notch conversions of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., is Pac-Man, and he had one called D2K, which is, I don't know if it's based off of that, like, bootleg Donkey Kong 2 arcade game or if it's just like original work of his, but it's like these very fiendish Donkey Kong stages. It's very cool. I think I've seen his version of Donkey Kong running at the, you know, one of the Intellivision booths, Intellivision Focus Boots at Portland Retro Gaming Expo. they tend to do a lot of homebrew stuff. And I do remember seeing a much better version of Donkey Kong running on Intellivision than I thought was possible. Yep, that's probably his work then.

Yeah, he really seemed to take it upon himself to take fairly maligned versions of games on that system and sort of showing what the machine could do if you had a lot more time and expertise to put towards it. I've never been, like, super tuned into a lot of the goings-ons in the television, like, scene, but I have encountered some of his stuff, and he was a really good developer. Apparently, he was living in Japan, doing something or other in his personal life. I'm not really sure. No one's really mentioned it. His family's posts were fairly private on that front, but, yeah, he'll be able to be. missed. Yeah, I am not directly familiar with his work, but it's, you know, it's cool that he was

a pioneer of the homebrew scene. And it doesn't surprise me too much that it was, you know, tied to Intellivision, although we think of, you know, NES emulation as being the sort of the popular proving ground that everyone loved in the 90s. And television was the, you know, the platform that actually had the most sort of official involvement in its later career post-official support. The Blue Sky Rangers that I mentioned before really did a lot to not only keep the brand alive and to produce compilations, but also just to document the history of the system. So, yeah, his involvement there makes him a pretty important contributor to video game history and the documentation thereof. So, you know, that's a, that is a sad loss.

I suppose on a similar note, just a couple of days ago now, another video game history documentary and past Nick Thorpe of Retro Gamer magazine. And he's not someone that I knew personally, but I'd interacted with a lot online. And I've read quite a few of his features. He was kind of the workhorse of Retro Gamer's Features Department. Like if you go to their website and look up articles that are, you know, carried over from the magazine, pretty much half of them had his byline. And he, you know, just looking over his lists of like top PlayStation games and that sort of thing. Like, he had good taste.

He, uh, he was, he, he, he had a good awareness of like the esoteric stuff, but also wasn't afraid to like, you know, give props to the things that are popular and good as well. But, you know, just from my interactions with him online and from what people I know who knew him more closely have said, he was just a great, goodhearted person who was, you know, working in retro gaming magazines, retro gamer magazine, just out of a genuine love of the medium. And he passed very young. He was just 38. So that was very sudden.

Like one day he was posting and the next day there was announcement that he had, you know, passed overnight. So it was not an expected thing, which makes it all the more tragic. Yeah. He's someone I've never met, but like I've read so much of his stuff over the years. And he was really good. what he did. Very good writer. Very, very knowledgeable, very happy to go into some very deep weeds, I guess I would

say on some of his topics. And I really appreciated that, especially anytime, like, anything I was looking up crossed into a retro gamer, I was like, oh, good, I'm in luck. Nick Thorpe, he got to the bottom of it or, like, he directed whoever he was you know sort of leading on these things because you know they have an army of freelancers he's directing them into the weeds so that one that one hurt even though he was someone i've never really interacted with that closely All right, so we've mostly talked about designers and programmers, but I do want to mention a composer who passed a few months ago, Masashi Kagayama, formerly of Sunsoft, best known for the amazing soundtrack for Mr. Gimmick, which I feel like I put on a retronauts radio a couple of years ago when that came out on Vineyard.

and cassette. But even though he didn't work on a lot of Sunsoft titles, his work embodied the Sunsoft sound with really great percussion, really smart sampling. If you're not familiar with Mr. Gimmick, it's an N.S. Famiccom game. Never came to the U.S. originally, just Europe and Japan. but it's a very colorful, bright platformer from that sort of late era. And by that point, Sunsoft was like at the peak of their 8-bit powers. And the soundtrack that he put together is very energetic, very rich, multi-layered. Like, you hear it and you think, wait, how is this coming from the NES? And I'm pretty sure that was one of those special mapper chips that Sunsoft used,

which maybe is why it didn't come to the U.S. because it was colorful and also they couldn't have done that soundtrack on a standard like MMC3 mapper. So, you know, just really making great use of the technology. And he didn't compose for a lot of games. He only has a handful under his belt. And some of them are just, you know, there's like a weird, etchy game from a few years ago that he contributed a single track to, and also Noriehiko Hebino of Metal Gear fame has a credit in that game as well. So I feel like that was one of those where some people just reached out and said, hey, can we commission a track? And he said, okay, and contributed it without necessarily knowing the nature of the game. But yeah, if you listen to his music, it's just great. It's

like great video game music. Yeah, I remember, I heard the news directly from Brave Wave because I know he was working with Brave Wave in recent years. I think he released either released an album with them or was contributed songs to an album for them. I believe Giants was it was called. So they were the ones to announce his death, I think, in English and Japanese. And it was just kind of a shock because, yeah, Mr. Gimic is kind of a technical Marvel. And the music is a big chunk of that. The fact that it's just so, I want to say punchy. I know punchy means different to different people, but like it's got punch to it is what I'm saying. Like, it's a real, like, no, you will notice me.

You will, like, this is a very exciting game about jumping and shooting a star and writing that star, but this music demands your attention. And that's no small feat. Yeah, I believe Brave Wave brought him out to Magfest this past January, unless just like a few months before he passed away, which was very shocking. And I think, I think that was very nice because he got to, he got to receive a lot of, adulation while he was there, I feel like. And I know he performed with a couple of the musical acts as well, because it turns out he was a bit of a musician as well. Which makes sense. Yeah, I see that a lot with some of these composers who worked in the video game space in the 80s and 90s, and they didn't really get much feedback from the public about their work.

And they're always kind of stunned and overwhelmed to discover that, well, there's a lot of people out here who really love what I did. And they've held on to my work all these years and it means something to them. Like, I see that a lot. And I'm happy that he had the opportunity to experience that and to maybe hopefully develop an understanding of how much people admired his work. you know, the way that it connected with people who played Mr. Gimmick back in the day or even more, more currently. So we've talked about the people that we know pretty well, and maybe the two of you know more about some of these other names that I'm going to read off than I do. But they're just, you know,

people who made significant contributions to gaming, but I'm not personally familiar with their work. And I did some reading on them. But, you know, it's not the same. as having followed their work for decades. So it's no slight intended. Just, you know, the games industry is not really that great at foregrounding its talent. It's not just a thing in Japan. It's also here. So unless you're, you know, one of the people showing up in the press and doing interviews

and presenting a GDC or whatever, a lot of your work is probably anonymous. I feel like Rebecca Heimann is kind of an exception to that. because she was so exceptional in her talent. But that's not to diminish anyone else who works in games, just this medium is really shitty at celebrating its talent. But, you know, looking at some of these people, I'm just like, wow, you know, I've played these games. I experienced their work.

And it's very sad that they're no longer with us. So I want to mention Victor Antonov, who was an art director, at Valve, Arcane, and Machine Games. Interestingly enough, he got his start with Redneck Rampage. That was a Doom, like a, was that the Doom Engine or Build Engine? I think it was the Doom Engine, wasn't it? But it was a PC game from the mid-90s, you know, thematically about as tasteful as you'd expect.

But taking that sort of 2.5D first-person shooter tech before we called them first-person shooters and applying it to, like, I haven't played it, but I have to assume it's full of, you know, kind of mean-spirited jokes about people who live in the Appalachians or Florida or whatever. But interestingly enough, he, you know, he was art director or, you know, involved in that. And then Rebecca Heindman ported the game to Mac. So, you know, there's a little connection there where their careers crossed. But You know, he eventually went on to Half-Life and contributed to, or to Valve and contributed to Half-Life 2. He contributed to Fallout 4.

He was the art director on Wolfenstein, The New Order, and more recently, the Outer Worlds 2. He was involved in Prey, the 2016 Doom. So, you know, he was pretty influential, but you don't really get to talk to art directors that often. So fairly anonymous in terms of video games. But chances are if you have played a first-person shooter at some point in the past 30 years, you've probably touched something that he worked on. I believe also at Arcane he worked on the Dishonored series. So not just first-person shooters, but also, you know, games that kind of pushed beyond just the shooting aspect into new directions. So, you know, involved in a lot of popular, very well-received, and influential games.

Another name worth mentioning is Tim Letourne, who got his start, from what I can tell, in the Quality Assurance Minds at Electronic Arts, working on Genesis and early Windows games. But eventually he was lifted out of QA purgatory. and became a producer in the late 1990s. And I believe his first production project was SimCity 3,000. But then once EA and Maxis spun the Sims out of SimCity, he was the EA producer, the EA side producer on the Sims, the Sims 2, and an absolutely ridiculous number of expansions and related projects for those two games.

There's also, I think, the final games industry person in terms of development that I want to mention this episode is Alan Emrick, who actually got to start making tabletop games. And his career intersected, I think, with both Rebecca Heinenman and Victor Antonov, because he worked at Interplay and then Valve and Gaw. and he worked on a lot of strategy games that kind of came from the tabletop experience like Master of Orion and Star Trek Starfleet Command. Kevin, you are Mr. Star Trek. What can you tell us about Starfleet Command? Have you played it? I have not actually played it. I didn't really dig into a lot of the 90s PC Star Trek games, but my understanding is that this is one that is generally well-liked, which is no small feet for Star Trek games.

Yeah, there aren't a lot of Star Trek games that are beloved. So the fact that he was the designer on the one that kind of seemed to click with a lot of, you know, a lot of PC gamers who gravitate more toward the strategy side of things. Speaks well of him. Yeah. And Master of Orion, like, I've heard people talk up that series for decades at this point. So having involvement on that is just a real feather in the cap. So, yeah, those are, again, just probably just a small percentage of the people involved in video games who passed this year, but the ones that stood out to me that I, you know, saw memorials for while researching this, and no slight as intended to anyone else who did not get mentioned this episode, but just wanted to kind of point out some of the, some of what the medium has lost in the past 12 months. Thank you.

I also do want to call out a couple of actors who passed in 2025 and were closely associated with video games. The first who just passed a couple of days ago was Kerry Hirouki Tagawa, who I know best as Minister Tagomi and the man in the high castle, the best character in that show. But when I saw the memorials roll out for him, most of them talked about his role as shengsung in Mortal Kombat. Is that correct? The movie? The 95 movie. Yeah. But he had a long career of, you know, like a lot of character actors, he played a lot of bit parts.

But also, as an Asian American, he played a lot of sort of villains. You know, I mentioned Star Trek. He's in the TNG pilot. But he's in the crowd at the Q trial, you know. I think he had maybe has one line. I think he's the bailiff in the Q trial. But he showed up on a lot of stuff. I know before Mortal Kombat, I remember I first spotted him in Rising Sun, which, you know, is a difficult movie to talk about these days.

But his character was very much sort of like, I believe was like Eddie, Eddie Sakaguchi or something. he was like a junior, a junior executive or someone working at the company, so he had a scandal around him. But he was also very much not, not really a villainous role, but just one like, sort of like a mysterious role. Like no one really knows what he was up to. And after his past, I remember I looked up an old interview. This is from 2001. And the interviewer just asked him, like, hey, is it, is it weird how many times like you were playing villains and stuff? And as he put it's like, well, if I'm going to play the villain, at least I want to make sure I'm playing a villain that is memorable. And I feel like in that regards, he absolutely, you know, understood

the assignment, as they say. So, yeah, the fact that people talk about Shang-soom, you know, Mortal Kombat, the first movie, like, has some charms to it, has some dumb parts to it, but I feel like his work in that movie is just unquestionably good, you know, and I do think one reason, one reason the sequel is not as fun is because he's not, there. You know, they stumped him out for a muscle man playing Shao Khan, and it's just, it's just not the same. I'm sorry. I like Brian Thompson, but it's just not the same. Yeah, I think him being in the one universally considered good at Immortal Combat movie speaks to him on that front. Yeah, he, I saw, you know, some, some quotes from him this past

week. And sort of resonating with the quote you gave Diamond about playing villains, supposedly he said something to the effect of, like, I understand what Hollywood wants from someone like me, specifically an Asian American actor. And, you know, I don't necessarily like it, but, you know, it's kind of paving the way for better things. So he, you know, he, you know, he was, you know, aware of sort of some of the distasteful stereotyping that affected his career, but, you know, it did lead to roles like Minister Tagomi, which, you know, was like once they wrote him out of that show, it really went downhill because he wasn't a villain. He was, he was a man kind of haunted by personal loss and really,

struggling to understand the otherworldly things happening around him and connect with those he had lost. And he was just a while at the same time, like playing a lot of political factions against each other in a very sort of understated, quiet way, just a fantastic performance in a great role. And, you know, I feel like the encounter at Farpoint bailiff roles paved the way for him. taking on meteor tasks like that. Also, another actor who, again, his memorials and tributes this year when they came out focused heavily on his contributions to video games, although he

certainly had a much broader oove than that, was Michael Madsen, who basically, yeah, someone probably Diamond added in the notes here. Actually, I'll just let you talk about it. You're the Hollywood fanatic here. Yeah, Michael Madsen is a guy who I think, I think a lot of people first noticed him during Reservoir Dogs, because let's face it, in a movie full of guys who are incredibly tough and mean to each other, he's kind of the toughest, snorliest, meanest guy in the movie, maybe next to Big Joe, but, you know, he made it in for himself in that movie. He worked with Tarantino a lot, and I feel like he took that rep of playing in all those

crime movies. And once the sort of early 2000s hit, he went right into the games because all a sudden you had those video games that were embracing the crime movie aesthetic. First of all, he's a voice in Grant's episode of 3. He's in Driver. Jeremy, you and I did an episode about

NARC. Not that long ago, he is one of the cops in NARC. Okay. Yeah. And of course, when they made a Reservoir Dogs game, of course, they got him to be in the Reservoir Dogs game because, you know, how could you not? How could you not? I also know that we're recording this as I think, I guess in America, it's not happening around here, but in America, there's some sort of revival of Kill Bill going on, like they're showing the entire Kill Bill movie, like, as one long movie instead of two movies.

And that's a, that's a great part for him. Like, that's not a big role for him, but he has some fantastic, just scene stealing moments and the fact that he sort of gets, you know, a surprise exit from the movie, even after these, you know, very emotional scenes, it's a, it's a great. little, it's a great little thing for him. But yeah, he, you know, very much a genre kind of actor. And I think some people forget, someone forget about his sister, Virginia, but his sister Virginia Manson also very accomplished actors. She's worked in a lot of other movies that I've seen. I think she kind of became a star first. And then he kind of became a star later on. But she's also still working as far as I can tell. Oh, there was, there was one last 2025 passing that I passed over.

by mistake, and that is Tetsuhisa Seko, who was the president of Nipponichi, from, again, from, you know, what I was able to read, there's not a lot of information about him because he was executive level, but he started to S&K and joined Nipponichi in 2002, so very early on, and was kind of overseeing everything. I feel like he is the guy who would come out, dressed as a prunny at TGS press conferences. Like the president of the company would constantly come out and like goof around at their press conferences. That was one of my favorite things at TGS every year was just the wild unhinged

NIS press conferences where they would, you know, announce like, here's the next Descaya game. Now here's all the voice actors to do like a 15 minute radio play for you on stage. So I feel like a lot of the. flamboyant personality and the things that we love about Niponichi games. He was involved in those in some respect. As an executive, I don't know how much of that was him, but certainly he steered the company through good times and bad. So, you know,

I'm going to be able to do. I'm going to be able to be. So I mentioned earlier that this is the first time we've done a memorial episode like this. We have put together episodes, you know, looking back at the lives of key figures in video games or associated with the video games like a Kira Toriyama, who passed last year or Satoro Yawada, who passed quite a while ago. But I do want to mention a few people who passed last year in 2024. just because, you know, I think some of their losses are still being, still being felt. We mentioned Janelle De Quays earlier. She got her start designing D&D games.

She worked at Calico and then went on into things like Quake, Age of Empires, just, you know, like her wife, Rebecca Heineman, a very, very talented, very prolific designer. Like Kevin, I think, said, you know, the two of them were royalty for PC gaming. So we mentioned Akira Toriyama. There was an entire episode about him after he passed. But, you know, I just can't imagine how different video games would be without Toriyama's involvement. Not just as an illustrator, but also some of the concepts he came up with for, you know, the Dragon Ball series, like the tournament arc was kind of. I feel like he was the one who codified that.

Like, can you imagine pop media, video games, and comics without tournament arcs? Like, what would that even be? What would that even look like? But no, a very, very, very influential creator. And I, you know, I wonder what Dragon Quest is going to be like without him because he was so heavily involved in giving it the look and personality that it had, the visual personality. I saw Yuji Hori talking about getting AI, like normalizing that for Dragon Quest, and, man, I do not want AI-generated versions of Toriyama monsters. Whatever they do, I hope it's not that. That just seems, no, thank you.

You know, the backlash over Dragon Quest 9 being slightly different, I feel like, would just be so much worse over having AI art for a Dragon Quest game. And they are deathly afraid of turning off their core audience of people who have been playing Dragon Quest since they were seven years old and stood in line at Yodabashi camera to get Dragon Quest 3. So fingers crossed, there will be a big outcry about that. But that doesn't have anything to do with Toriyama. What's up? It's telling that since Toriyama's passing, we have not really heard anything new about Dragon Quest 12, which was announced many years ago at this point. You think that it has something to show off, but no, that it's been very quiet. it. That's kind of how it goes with them, though. I mean, Dragon Quest 11, like, they announced it,

and then it took years. They're just really slow at making the, don't take this the wrong way, the same RPG over and over again. I mean, I love Dragon Quest, but it's not, it's not like, you know, they're coming up with a radical new style of video game every time. It's really about the, you know, the content and the stories. So I guess it makes it. sense that they wouldn't show something until they had something to show in terms of like, hey, here's what the world looks like, here's what the characters look like, because you know, you know how it's going to play, basically. It might be a little more open world than before, maybe not. But beyond that, you're going to have the turn-based combat, and there's

going to be slimes. Also on the RPG front, Yoshitaka Murayama, the kind of lead creator of Swaykaden. We talked about him a bit and Tim Usagi, the mysterious Tim Usagi in our Sweenedin one episode earlier this year. You can go check that out. Andrew Greenberg, also on the RPG front, who co-created wizardry with Robert Woodhead. He was kind of the less known facet of wizardry, but still seemingly involved in its creation for quite a while. Mutsumi Inomata, who illustrated several of the tales of games, passed last year as well. There were a few actors who passed, Rachel Lillis, best known for voicing a lot of Pokemon in the U.S. And Atsko Tanaka, who voiced Chunli, among other characters.

A pretty big one, Tony Todd, one of those character actors that everyone loved. Actually, what was he involved in in video games? I know he did a lot of stuff. I mean, he was just, he was ubiquitous. I mean, we can't not mention Star Trek, you know, the fact that he had... Oh, yeah, he was current, right? Yeah, not only did he have recurring characters in Star Trek, but he had guest roles in Star Trek that were some of the very most, very most powerful guest roles.

I think all the time about the visitor on D-Space 9, where he plays an old, an elderly, Jake Sisko trying to meet his dad for one last time. Oh, that's right. I forgot that was him. Yeah, it was. it was, and also much more recently, indeed, his posthumous work, he was a big part of the Final Destination series, and they released a new one of those not that long ago right after his passing, and he is in the movie, and he essentially, you can see he's looking ill, and

he has a very small role, and he basically says goodbye, and it's a very powerful moment in a movie, you know, these movies are very silly because it's all about, like, he's sort of, you know, ridiculous Rube Goldberg-style deaths that people before. but there is a heart to them and the fact that he had that moment where he basically says goodbye to the audience it really it spoke to me

like I watched that movie not that long ago on an airplane of all places and just watch I saw him on a little screen I'm like oh there he is look at him he's great

and speaking of Virginia Manson for Virginia Manson of course he was the he was Candyman which she was she was the reporter and he was the candy man that was him

and for games I know he was involved in, like, the more recent, like, Spider-Man 2, Sony game, the Indiana Jones game that came out last year, and some, and a few, like, older things here and there, mostly Star Trek projects. So he was around. So, yeah, I don't want to belabor any of this, you know, pause and, you know, pause and just kind of memorialize a few of the really talented people who have passed recently and whose work has shaped video games and had an impact on the lives of those of us who love video games. You know, I feel like we can't do any of them justice as people or even professionally

in a 90-minute podcast. And, you know, that's not really what we're intending to do. We just want to, again, just take a moment to save farewell and to acknowledge the impact that they've had on people's lives and what they brought to this medium, this form of entertainment that we all love so much. And yeah, that's really all I have to say for this episode. I don't know if either of you have any final thoughts before we sign off. The only thing comes to mind is the fact that, you know, video games are still relatively young as mediums go. And the fact is, there are so many people from the early days who are still with us. And unfortunately, you know, as time goes by, we're going to lose access to those people one by one.

So I do think it's important to take, when we have losses like this is important to take the time out and acknowledge them because, yeah, the pioneer. The pioneers, many of the pioneers are still with us, but unfortunately, some people, like, as all the people on this list here kind of went too soon, and, um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know I've interviewed several people over the years who have passed away since then, and a few of these cases, like, they did not do a lot of interviews. They did not do a lot of media. I think it's, I think it's nice whenever you can get these stories down. to be able to share them and help people. Remember these folks and their contributions and their lives.

It's always something that's felt nice for me whenever I've interviewed, like, back in the day when I was a newspaper reporter. I used to interview like World War II vets before they passed away. And I know in at least a couple cases, they passed away not too long after I interviewed them. And, you know, it's just, it's nice to be able to know that you're remembered and that people can tell your story. That's kind of where I feel with a lot of these folks. It's nice to be able to talk about them. Yeah. And as I mentioned when we were talking about Victor Antonov, you know, this industry is not good about foregrounding real talent.

it's not good about putting the people who really, you know, have their boots on the ground making games in front of the press. And I think it's, you know, incumbent on us as journalists or podcasters or, you know, historians, whatever, to find these people. That's something I'm not that great at, honestly, and I should be better at. But there's so many stories out there to be told, we're fortunate that, you know, people like Itigaki and Rebecca Heinemann have been so vocal and, you know, so accessible to talk about their work. But that's not the case for everyone. So, you know, for everyone who didn't get mentioned here, you know, I'm grateful for their contributions to the medium as well. And, you know, going forward, I do want to be more

mindful of trying to find the people who made these games and learning more about it. Honestly, when I was in the press, that was always my favorite part of writing about video games was finding the people who made the games and getting a story out of them that hadn't been published before and bringing new information to the world and just getting their perspectives and their story out. Anyway, so that, um, That is it for this episode, this video game wake. And that's a, I don't really know exactly how to end something like this because we usually end on such an upbeat chipper note. And, you know, it's, it's, it's a, this is a sadder episode, but one that I think, you know, still merits being made.

So anyway, this has been retronauts. You can find us talking about video game history and often the people who help create, video game history every week at retro nuts.com and on Patreon. I will spare you the spiel. But, you know, if you want to help document, help us document video game history, that is where you can find us. And we have produced hundreds and hundreds of episodes talking about great games and great people who make great games. And, you know, bad games and the great people who did their best. So that's it. You can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Blue Sky is Jay Parrish, Blue Sky Social, and creating podcasts here at Retronauts, doing

video game history facing things at Limit to Run Games, and on my YouTube channel, Jeremy Parrish. Kevin, where can we find you online? I'm on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org, which is also my website where I do have a couple of interviews with folks who have passed away on there, actually. I also do a YouTube series focused on the Atari 2600 and to some extent the Intellivision as well under the name Atari Archive

and that is also the name of my book that you can pick up through limited run games Diamond You can find me around the internet by looking up Fight Club F-E-I-T-C-L-U-B and my website is Fight Club.me recording what I've been writing

or podcasting about and again you also put that Fight Club any social media, you'll probably find me on there. All right, that wraps it up for this episode. We'll be back in a few days with our, you know, the usual round of end-of-year retrospectives about other years that weren't this year, if that makes sense. In the meantime, thank you for listening. Thank you for your support.

And to all those we talked about this episode and many others, thank you for what you brought to video games. You know, I'm going to I don't know I'm you know I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm and then and I'm I don't know I don't know.