Retronauts - Episode 360: Gaming in the Year 2001

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Certain conditions have made time mostly meaningless, so it may shock and alarm you that 2001 happened 20 years ago. Yes, it's true. And while it was a monumental year in terms of events that shook the world, 2001 was also home to huge, industry-changing games, console launches, and so many other delightfully dated gaming moments worth remembering. This week, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Henry Gilbert, and Axe of the Blood God's Kat Bailey as the crew jumps back to an era where they were shockingly all adults. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, 2001, a games podacy. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. This week's topic is the year 2001 in gaming, and I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, who is here with me in the same room today, six feet apart, as always. Celebrating my senior year of high school, Henry Gilbert. Oh, nice.

I was already in my first year of college. Who is our East Coast correspondent? Hey, it's Jeremy Parrish, riding a bicycle built for two. And who do we have also in the Bay Area on the line? Hey, it's Kat Bailey, and this was a year that I was in the Minnesota Marching Band. Kat, I think you might be too cool for this podcast, I dare say. But yeah, so, Jeremy, you've already done episodes about other anniversary years that are coming up this year in 2021. So I've taken over for this year 2001.

And I will say, I don't want to get too gloom and doomy off the bed. But whenever something comes out in the year 2001, I look back at it, you know, you get that moment in your head. you're like, ooh, 2001, like, ooh, something bad happened there. Now, 2021, when we look back at things that happened in this period, it's going to be an even bigger cringe moment. But now I feel like we're kind of getting a 9-11's worth of casualties every day. So we're a nearer to so much tragedy that I can just look back at 2001 now and breathe a sigh of relief almost.

But there were good things that happened in this year. We're going to look back at a lot of them. But first, I want to know where everybody was in their lives to provide some context for the audience. So let's start with Henry High School Boy over here. Yes. Well, so I graduated from high school in May of 2001. And then, like, my second week of community college was a certain week of September.

And so, yeah, it was a real memorable year for me, for sure. And it was also the year I think I truly became a gamer because I had. I had spent the N64 generation, you know, getting really into it. But in 2001, it was both the first year I got a part-time job to buy my own games whenever I felt like it. And it was the first time I ever pre-ordered a console with my own money and picked it up myself. And that was the Nintendo GameCube. Plus, it was the interesting transition of all my friend group of gamers who we all played together. we all moved from high school into our college slash managing a CBS years of our lives.

Not me, but my friends became C. Two of my friends became CVS managers. It's honest work. And we became a different type of gamer in that time, especially with their two big 2001 games became major games for me and my crew of pals. Kat, how about you? 2001 was a weird year for me. Like Henry, I graduated from high school in 2001.

2001, on a more personal note, was also the year that I was fully out as queer. And I was really, let's say, having a lot of disagreements with my parents over this around this time. And then I went over to college and I got very gay and met my partner. That's what all every parent fears, Katz. The past 20 years or so, I was also, as I already mentioned, in the marching band. And that was taking up a lot of my life in the fall of 2001. So I was adjusting to college and it was kind of a lonely time. But luckily I had my girlfriend with me and in that sense, life was good.

As for my gaming life, I bought a Dreamcast early in 2001 and I bought a launch GBA because I was working in a convenience store at that time and I was making the big bucks. And in hindsight, I wish I hadn't done that because I wish I had saved my money for a, PlayStation 2, but I'll get to that. And Jeremy, out of all of us, I believe you are at least semi-professional in the Games Press at this time. What was your 2001 like? No, actually, I wasn't professional in the Games Press at this point. I had done

a little freelancing for GameSpot in 2000. I wrote the Skies of Arcadia or, yeah, Skies of Arcadia and Kronocross guides for them. And then the dot-com bubble dried up and all that sweet, sweet guide money just it went away. But in 2001,

I'd been out of college for a couple of years and had a job and was living in Texas. And after that election and the way things went, I was just like, I cannot be here anymore. So around that time, I met someone online. And she was like, you should move out of Texas. And I said, yes. So I tried to find work in New York City. But this was right around the time the economy just went straight into the shitter. And people were like, you're just some kid from Texas.

You have no skills that would be applicable here, no experience. Please go away. So I ended up bouncing to Michigan where my parents lived. They just moved back and being jobless there. But at the end of the year, I did get to go to Japan for the first time, thanks to some relatives, large yes. And so it was, yeah, it was kind of a tumultuous year. I was all over the place, uprooted, spent actually weirdly a couple of months offline

when I was sort of between places. places. So, yeah, that's the last time I was actually not online for the rest of my life, probably. Shockingly, yeah, you could actually do that in the year 2001, just not go to the internet. Yeah, well, I mean, I was, you know, I was a pretty active person online at that point. I had a reasonably popular blog before we called them blogs. And back when like a couple thousand hits a day was considered popular, you know, there was no micro blogging or social media or anything like that. So that was kind of it. But at the end of the year, when I, you know, when I was in Japan, my website got its first link from Penny Arcade. And I thought, wow, I am on cloud nine.

I am like, I have been recognized. People are reading me. I'm hanging out in Japan with a cool girl and like eating pocky and shit. It's so great. So, you know, the year was pretty rough, but it did at least end on a very happy note. And then I came back from Japan that very last week, like, you know, after Christmas, just a few days. And I was super jet lagged and basically sat on a, on a chair and played Final Fantasy 10 for five days straight at like weird hours of the day. So kind of a blur, kind of like a nerd, nerd paradise there. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, when I was in the year 2001, I think my fantasy life involved a trip to Japan and a girlfriend, which I had neither in that year. I was living the life. Yeah. It's true. In 2001, I also was definitely reading ToastyFrog.com. Me too.

And as for me, so yeah, I graduated high school in 2000. I'm like these children on the podcast. I took a semester off, but instead of, you know, backpacking through Europe, I just sat in my bedroom and played JRP's and, you know, earn money through a minimum-made job. And then in 2001, it was my first semester of college in the spring. And it just felt like, oh, yeah, so my adult life will be easy. Just, you know, go to college and get your degree. Any job will accept you.

All you need is a degree is what I was told. That wasn't the truth, but I was believing it then. But more importantly, what happened in 2001 was my writing career began because I answered a message board post on a news group. Someone was looking for anime reviewers, and I was like, I like anime. And so I started being a reviewer for this website called the Jacksonville Film Journal and would just get boxes and boxes of anime sent to my house every month until it became a burden. But I was enjoying the fruits of being an online writer at the time, not getting paid, just being able to keep. or sell the DVDs I got. And I think 2001 is when, after following Jeremy and his website for a bunch,

that's the first time I ever wrote something for you, Jeremy. Yeah, yeah, because I launched that zine, Toasty Frog Zine, it was imagined to be called. And I still have that put away somewhere in my apartment. But yeah, I was in a few of those. I believe the first thing I ever wrote for Jeremy, maybe the first, like, games piece that was ever published was a review of Eco, the Game Eco. Wow. And, yeah, I mean, then I just never stopped making,

content. I've always been feeding the beast for the past 20 years, and it feels strange to me to still look back and be like, wow, I've made things for 20 years. And it's, I can't believe there's so much things I've made just are still online somewhere in some state, but don't read them. Before the year 2006, I say hands off. Yeah, I think there's a pack of those zines, all of them, available digitally on Gum Road, if you look for them. It's like $2 or something. So you can, you can go find your first piece of games writing if you want and uh for whatever reason i was thinking of what one up stuff the other day and one up presents that magazine is still available online digitally and uh i found that shocking do you know where that money goes jeremy i want to investigate

this um so that was my account and i would get the payouts and then hand them over and i don't have access to that anymore because it was my one up email address and i've been tempted a few times to reach out to them and say, like, hey, that was me. Please give me all the money that's come in. It belongs to me. You should send it to me. But I haven't done that. When we, there's only like 50 bucks in there or something.

When the lockdown is over, you should do that and we can have a pizza party with the one that presents money. I'll bring my final fantasy wine and we'll have pizza and it'll be the ultimate podcasting party. Potion and pizza together at last. Yep. I'm saving the final fantasy wine for when we can record Retronuts in person again. If that San Francisco pizza you're buying, $50 will not cover one.

That'll get you a slice. A slice of cheese and they'll tell you to get out. We can't go like Golden Boy or something. I think so. There's a place in Alameda, New York pizza that's also a pretty good slice and it's cheap. We will live stream it so everyone can see it. So yeah, you all, everyone knows where we were in 2001. So I want to give some more context as to what this year entailed before we talk about the games

because 2001 was an interesting year and not just for the reason you think. because the culture was interesting in that we talked a lot about the end of history in the year 2000. Everything is going to be shiny and great and the tech industry is booming and, you know, Democrats for president forever. That wasn't the case in the year 2001. So we were sort of in the hangover of the end of the future, the end of history, rather, and the promises of this shiny neoliberal future were not, clearly not going to come true. So we were sort of in like a holding pattern at the time.

I mean, yeah, George W. Bush successfully stole. the election and you're just feeling like well this sucks this was my first especially for me it was the first election i voted in i think for oh me too yeah yeah you guys too i uh not uh and in florida too and it just was like a real a real kick in the uh the gut to start my uh political life i suppose to but yeah i and then it's just supposed to be about like oh george w bush what a lame president and you feel this the whole year yeah until a certain month and all you heard about him was like He just golfs a lot. He takes all these vacation days.

What a lazy oaf. And then you figured that would be the worst of it for four years. And then obviously things changed. Yeah. Yeah, I remember thinking that mostly I thought that things wouldn't change all that much when George W. Bush came in because it was like, yeah, whatever. They're all the same for the most part. And that was kind of the prevailing attitude, I feel like in 2001.

It wasn't, it was like, yeah, Bush will be here. Then he'll be gone in four years, whatever. And then, of course, 9-11 happened. And everything changed. Yay. It really did. We're still in many wars. As for social media, not existing quite yet.

That'll just be a few more years down the road with things like, you know, Friendster and MySpace and all those things and eventually Facebook. But blogs and blogging were very much on the rise in 2001. But 2002 would bring about the rise of both Gawker and Gizmodo. And then in 2003, WordPress would come along and really democratized blogging. So blogs exist, but you kind of have to know how to make a web page in order to be on the Internet. And I've heard some very smart people say this and I'm going to steal it from them. But like to, if you were on the forums, if you were like busy on some forums in 2001, you were probably prepared for what social media is, which is just the forum for everybody. And it's just, it's forum fights.

It's calling mods. It's, it's dunks. It's all of those things. Like that, that is what forums trained you for. I was, I was rather active for a time on the. IGN Nintendo forums especially, like just, I was more of a lurker, but occasionally if something got my ire, I would, I'd say like, Final Fantasy's coming back to the Nintendo. You'll see.

Yeah, it did prepare me for the world of just everything is a message board now. Everything is posting. The president gets mad at the mods. It just, I was ready. I fought those battles in the early 2000s. But yeah, Jeremy, you, like you said, you had your Toasty Frog website, and that was just written from scratch, right? Yeah, initially. I think in like 2002, 2003, I switched over to a CMS. But yeah, initially it was just raw HTML or I used like a page layout program. But it was all from scratch. And it was a pain of the ass update every single time.

Yeah, I had a similar website kind of ripping you off a bit. And I would like to. I think I was probably ripping off Sharkey. So it's all it's all circular. I liked it. It was getting a following. But one day I broke the front page and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. so I just stopped updating my website because it was all just like hand coding going to different FAQs, copying code from other websites, just like figuring out on your own before there was just the WordPress for everybody. Yeah, I would change the design and layout of my site around a different art theme like every other week. And that was a lot of work.

And I just cannot believe how much free time I used to have. Just amazing. Used to have splash pages. Yep, splash pages until I realized, well, those are going the way of the Dodo. I'll get rid of those. But then I would just change like the frame around my front page to be like, hey, now it's you know, Metroid graphics. Now it's, you know, a reference to Discworld.

Now it's this, whatever my obsession is at the moment. I do miss, even though it was a lot more work, looking back at this period for the web, I do miss the design of webpages because now everything, what few web pages still exist are now just the Gawker endless blog format. We don't have like fun designs anymore for the most part. Yep. I remember the magic of waiting for. just going to my like couple dozen sites every day to see was it updated like a big one for me

was the web comic leisure town oh yeah leger town's great and leisure town i started reading web comics actually and leisure town would not update for months at a time and then one day he'd drop a like a 70 page comic just like there there you go yeah i mean the early 2000s were the the boom of web comics too because i mean penny arcades started in 98 by this time they were making jeremy famous and uh they were the king makers but like so many other popular webcomics were starting in this era and uh other things that were happening in the year 2001 is a bit torrent which did for video what napster did for audio but in a nice and legal way nobody nobody was breaking the law technically and by the way napster was shut down in july of 2001 so bit torrent so in 2001 i was i was i was i didn't

didn't know what BitTorrent was until at least 2005, 2006. I was using like Kazaa and stuff like that lime wire. Yeah, I didn't realize BitTorrent was that old. I remember using it in like maybe like late 2003 or late 2004 at work to download something. And this was at oneup.com. And the IT guy like came running to my desk. He was like, what the hell is going on here? Like all of a sudden your computer's just sending out all these pings across the network. And it's just like all this traffic going back and I've never seen anything like it He had a meltdown I think I was ahead of the game on BitTorrent

Just because I was way into the anime And that was just how you saw a new anime Because unlike the crunchy roles And Funimations of today There weren't like same day simulcast You had to either wait three years for the DVD Or just watch it after somebody fan sub did So I remember one of my earliest interviews I did

Was for somebody who worked at the Right Stuff Company I was asking them And probably in the year 2002 How do you feel about Torrance? And they were very worried And obviously that helped crater that industry for a while. Yeah, right stuff's back better than ever now. Yeah, I was probably just Kazaiing it up at that time, too.

I wasn't, I didn't get smart to BitTorrents for a while. Getting computer viruses from Kazah. I think, well, yeah, I believe one friendly bro of mine let me know that Kaza could also be used for naughty videos as well. And that changed. That made me very excited to use Kazah. Guilty as charged. One last thing I want to talk about, not to get too modeling, but obviously September 11th happened. It was very tragic, and we all were alive in adults back then.

And if you want to talk a bit about that, you can. If not, it's cool. But, like, I just was playing lots of games to cope. And, in fact, the day September 11th happened on September 11th, 2001, I was at best by buying a copy of Advance Wars because technically the game came out on the tent. But the way retail worked back then is the game would come in on the Monday. And then it would be put out on the Tuesday, usually. So it wasn't actually on shelves until the 11th. And I thought it was rather cheeky that I was buying the advance wars game,

not knowing the scope of 9-11, just being a very shit-headed young person at the time. Like, I'm buying the war game. But, yeah, I played a lot of advance wars, playing a lot of RPGs, just using games to cope, being on the internet too much, trying to avoid the news. Does anybody want to talk about, like just gaming-related 9-11 stuff, not to get too far into it? I was playing Symphony of the Night at that time because I found it, Somebody recommended it on the internet, and I found it in a local game shot,

because this is a time when you can still find games like Symphony of the Night in stores. And so I had never really played a Castlevania game at that time. And so I remember playing it that morning when I and having my laptop open to IRC when my friend said, turn on the TV. And of course, then I saw the towers burning and everything. And then I was in the marching band at that time, I think I already mentioned. And our normal performances were canceled. We went up to the capital, the state capital, to do a performance, and I was about five feet away from Jesse Ventura, as he told us how proud he was to be Minnesota's commander in chief.

I forgot he was the governor back then. He was the governor at that time, and he was so afraid of al-Qaeda attacking him that he canceled. He made his schedule private because, you know, Jesse Ventura, a very important fellow. He would just like punch the bomb out of the sky if they tried to get him. someday he'll get to the bottom of the conspiracy theory of 9-11 I know I know Jeremy you have like clonoa-based memories of 9-11 I remember you had them in some notes or something like that yeah therefore the next episode we're going to record but that's okay I can spill the beans now

the clanoa beans baby I want clanoa beans yeah so so the the game clanoa which one is it empire of dreams the puzzle platformer for gBA came out around that time or maybe it was about to come out and I had the import version. I can't remember. But anyway, back then I used to write game facts occasionally and I decided,

hey, this one is kind of like a interesting little puzzle game. It's probably not going to get a lot of traction. So it would be fun to be the person who writes a guide for it because no one else is going to. So, yeah, basically, you know, after kind of coming to terms of what was happening on 9-11, I was just like, you know, I can't like register this with my brain. It's just too much. I need to get away for a little while. So I went back and just, you know,

worked on methodically playing through Klanoa levels and writing about how to beat them and then kind of burned out on it. But I don't know. That's basically my memory. My other memory is just going out of the house that day and driving down the block and the gas prices had gone from like $2 a gallon to five.

I was like, you absolute bastards. Just, you know, pure, pure capital. capitalism at its worse. You know, I hate to say I had the same day as Bob, but we were very similar that day because, yeah, I, as I recall, a day or two before on the 9th or 10th, IGN dropped like a 10 out of 10 review for Advance Wars or maybe it was like 9.9. I was like, oh my God, it's that good. Like that definitely was going to get me to get it.

And so I went to Walmart that evening undetored by the new. and I was like I want to play this game and and it also just turned into like for me having a GBA in my hand while the TV was playing endless news about like because that day was you watch the news as it was breaking and then it just turned into like well the news doesn't stop you don't turn it off the breaking never stops breaking and so it was just like well as long as I have the news on all the time I guess I'll just have this handheld in my hand and I'll look up at the at my uh Tube television, my SD tube television, and see if anything else happened. Coincidentally. Not only that, but the internet broke that day. Like, all of the news sites went down because a major cell tower was in the World Trade Center. So everything was incredibly slow. I had no idea. Wow.

And coincidentally, the period that would follow 9-11 would be just an incredible period for gaming. New consoles. It was the first year that the PS2 had good games that season. A bunch of very important things came out. So the president told us, go out. and shop, and shop we did, because there were lots of things to buy. We all made sure the terrorists didn't win at that holiday season. I waived my tiny flag while picking up my PS2.

No, wait, that was the previous year. Okay, GameCube. I don't want to dwell on this too long, but I can't think of a more of a before and after period in my life than 9-11, just because that was 10 days after I started college. Yeah, yeah. So I had just left home. I'm in college. I'm living alone for the first time, and then 9-11 happens.

and in a hot second. Like, it's a cliche to say that everything changed, but it is such a clear delineation in my mind of before and after. I feel the same way, Kat, even though I had like one semester of college under my belt, it felt like that is when my adult life truly began. Or it was, that's when my adult life was sabotage and everything got a lot worse. My brother wanted to go into public administration. So he was like, well, you know, I should get some time in military service under my belt

because that'll look good on my record. And so he joined the Navy and his first day of officer candidate school was September 10th. So all of us at home were extremely thrilled about that. And it was that like the flags just appeared everywhere. Like everywhere there was a flag. You could not escape the American flag. I feel like it's, it is only turned down about 20% over the last 20 years. And still the flag is kind of everywhere, which, uh,

I'm just staying aesthetically, it can get tiresome. Sometimes I forget what country I'm in. It's nice to have a reminder. And at baseball games, at the seventh inning stretch, they had always seen, God bless America. Yeah. Yeah.

At my local airport in Jacksonville, Florida, which is like in no danger ever, they had to have like the biggest flag in the world, just like behind plexiglass on the wall in the security area, just to let you know, like, are you? And I think it was like partially burned. to like make it look like it or maybe it was like burned in the twin towers but the point was if you were getting mad about how long this TSA line was taking you look at that flag and you

remember that it's happening for a reason buddy my my last memory is that right after 9-11 I left my cushy grocery store job to work at a video game store which was a huge mistake by the way but that video game store was in a mall and when people found out I was going to work at a mall they're like you're just walking into an open grave they're going to they're going to bomb all of our malls, you're not safe. Like, they thought the terrorists were going to take over our malls. Like, no, this is not die hard. I'm making $5.15 an hour.

Which was considered a major target for attack, which, I mean, the Mall of America? They're going to capture the stoopy roller coaster. Yeah, I remember you're the anthrax attacks. Yeah, yeah, being around after that, right in the wake of that. Yeah, that was the point at which I, like, kind of came to my senses, because it was just easy to soak in this paranoia and I remember going to a grocery store in some tiny town in central Michigan and buying like wanting to buy something from the bulk food section but I thought but what if someone's laced it with anthrax and then I stopped and I thought what the hell

am I what am I thinking like if if people are you know out to perform acts of terror they're not going to come to this rinky dink little town of like 5,000 people to the grocery store and spike the cookie bin at the bulk cookie bin at mire with with poison that's just stupid what am i doing that's least suspected it's coming for you jeremy parrish yeah that that was a very like important moment for myself to just like snap out of this this haze that ever settled on so many people it took me a couple of weeks but i got over it and then uh just felt very angry about the inevitability of war oh hey i was right cable news really took over like when cable news as we know it truly began and Fox News became like the kind of the force that it would eventually become.

Yeah, no, the monster. And also like, while I'm with the news, anytime an accident happened, like if a, a plane crashed, which is a like a just regular old tragedy, for about two hours after crash, people would be like, is this it? Is this? Like, we were all just so on edge. I mean, the media was making us on edge too with their reporting. Fox News was perpetually an orange alert.

Yeah. No, the ticker, the ticker. got on the bottom of just every channel of the regular news channels and it never went away. You're never allowed to breathe. Do we still have the terror levels because I was playing a game, a remake of a game

that came out in 2006 and a lot of the game is making fun of that and I was like, how do I check that now? Are we at green? Are we at yellow? Are we a mob? I do believe Obama got rid of that. I think. I do believe. So let's talk about pop culture outside of gaming really quick just to tell you what things were

popular in 2001. So I've got the top movies, TV shows, and albums. And some of this will not surprise you. It's all very obvious. But the top movies of 2001, number one is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Oh, wait. I don't know why I wrote that. I mean, that's the real name of it.

It's a poster stone. Kids won't see a movie about philosophers. Sounds boring. So, yeah, that's number one. You know, people are waiting for the first adaptation. I think it's a Fellowship of the Ring. Because Fellowship of the Ring, to me, was like, the movie that year. I think that came out later in the year, like right at the very end of the year.

So, yeah. So I think it just didn't have as long in the theater to catch up. I don't know if it actually outperformed Harry Potter. And so, yeah, Harry Potter is number one. Lord of the Rings, number one is number two. And then number three, Monsters, Inc, which actually beat Trek, which surprised me, because Shrek, well, you could not escape Shrek. Shrek is 2001 to me. Did Shrek win the best animated picture that year?

Sadly, yes. Yep. It was, yeah, the first, I guess it's because Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, those have just both continued in their own ways for 20 years. But Shrek feels so specifically tied to 2001 to me that that one feels stuck in the past, like of all of all the top ones. I remember. I will say in Shrek's not necessarily defense, but I will say that at the time it did

seem like really surprising to have an animated movie that was basically just a giant Disney piss take because Disney was so dominant in terms of animation. Like you didn't, if you wanted to see a serious animated movie, it was Disney or Pixar. And here was a movie that just existed instead of trying to like do the Disney thing badly. It was like, no, let's just make fun of it. Let's, you know, let's mock it. Let's like, you know, turn sad, the fantasy tropes on their head and satirize them. And it actually was kind of refreshing at the time. And it really wore out its welcome and it's an extremely dated movie. But, you know, I will give it credit for doing something that you just didn't see at the time.

Now, you know, it's trite. So like everyone does it. Yeah, I will say I was not above Shrek. I fell under the thrall of Shrek. And I probably saw it twice in theaters with a friend. I think I saw Shrek twice. It was like, wow, Shrek. I tolerated Shrek to the first viewing.

and then my second viewing, I hated it. That was on DVD. That friend soon learned to hate track because he worked out of Suncoast that holiday season and just Trek was on a loop. Every eight-hour shift just like you watch Shrek six times. That's how it works.

I remember liking it at the time, but I also remember thinking that the CGI Circa 2001, as I saw it in the theaters, was not that good. Was not as good as the spirits within. Certainly not as good as Pixar because, I mean, Monsters Inc. It had the fur, the blue fur on Sully and everything.

It was great. Donkey's fur, not as impressive. And the number five movie, Oceans 11, a fine movie. Movie stars, the movie. I can't believe that is 20 years old. Yeah. That's bonkers. And it's worth watching to see what Brad Pitt is eating in every scene.

Is it like a new exotic animal or something? No, he's just always, he eats in every scene that he's on, like, every time you see him. He's grazing the entire movie. Interesting. So top TV shows of 2001, these are. just like the 90s never ended yet. The 90s are still going on in terms of television. So number one TV show 2001 is Friends.

Number two is CSI. Number three is ER. Number four, everybody loves Raymond. Number five, Law and Order. So a lot of very 90 shows are number one in the top five in 2001. So in 2001, Star Trek Discovery starts. Not in the top five. Enterprise, Enterprise, that one.

Star Trek Enterprise starts. and I met my girlfriend because I watched the first episode of Enterprise and got into an argument with her the next day. And then we fell in love. And it was true love from that moment on. But everybody was very hung up on the fact that they had that incredibly bad pop song as the theme song. It's all anybody could talk about the next day.

Was that the Bacula Driven Star Trek series? It's a long time. You know that one. It's a Rod Stewart song. with all those top shows I do remember that weird like month month and a half of waiting

for when the shows come back you know and what will be the what will be their response if any to it because you're like how will all these fictional characters refer to it

and it's like is I recall friends sort of like that's a New York show too Law and Order really did stuff with it because it's like it was the writ from the head

line show, I remember. Yeah, Enterprise was weird because it was, you know, the first season was pretty much all written before 9-11 happened, but there is a faction of kind of like alien terrorists called the Sulevan. That, it's very

clear what they were referencing, but it was based on like the news before the big event. So it, yeah, like that is, that is the weird Star Trek that lives in the shadow of 9-11. And it did, it did forge its identity eventually and turned pretty good but yeah for a while it was just kind of like it was it was an

awkward show it's worth noting also that post 9-11 is when the food network exploded because everybody was just looking for comfort food it was yeah truly the rise of emeral on talking futurama we were tracing the history of emerald because there's a character on futurama based on emerald and he was never bigger than at this period of time bam i i mean we watched emerald all the time like it felt like every tv in the girls wings in our school had food network on pretty much 24 so cat emerald had two shows he had emerald essence of emerald and emerald live i i really got into good eats around then yeah the the alton brown series oh iron chef was on at this time oh yeah so top albums of 2001 uh so the number one album of 2001 is one the beatles and i remember

this was my introduction to the beetles and i i bought it and i was like i'm a cool guy who likes the Beatles now. And that was my experience with that album. Did anyone else buy this album? It's a great greatest hits. Oh, yeah. I did buy it. It was good.

Yeah, I still have it on my phone, actually. I still have the CD somewhere. Number two is J. Lo, Jay Lowe's debut album. And number three is Shaggy's album Hot Shot with the hit song, it wasn't me. Oh, okay. And number four is Dave Matthews band every day, which I have no idea what's even on that, but it was very popular in 2001.

I don't know. I just remember in 2001 I made fun of a friend for being really into Dave Matthews band but I did not listen to that You were right Henry Your cruelty was accurate And number five is the third posthumous

Tupac album until the end of time So again I'm not sure what was on that album I don't recall any radio play of Tupac in 2001 But prove me wrong kids So before we take our break, I want to just go over the state of consoles in 2001 because this is truly the end of an era because it was one of the last years where this many different platforms with this many different kinds of technology

were being supported at once. So it was a very fun time to be alive because we had so many things coexisting somewhat peacefully. And the first one I have on my list is the PlayStation, which was still kicking in 2001 because the PS2 was very, very hard to find for at least the first six to eight months. I felt very lucky in getting a launch PS2.

Yeah, in my house we didn't own a PS2 until I think actually 2003 or so because this year we got the two other consoles so it's like I guess we don't really need a PS2 and then eventually we accepted like now let's let's play that new Final Fantasy I guess we should like yeah but that that Dragon Quest 7

on PlayStation that was probably the last game I played on PlayStation and it literally made me like dizzy to play it's uh I couldn't it's too hideous so I didn't beat I didn't really play and didn't beat that game until the 3DS remake of it that game doesn't do surrogue, but that was really one of the last big games in terms of size for the PlayStation 1 in the year 2001. But as for me, like, playing the PlayStation, I did a ton of that on my PS2 because the

first fall of the PS2 was just trash. And then it wouldn't be until the fall of 2001 that a lot of big, important games would be coming out. Anybody else have PlayStation 1 experience in this year? So anyone's still playing the PlayStation? I was definitely still playing the PlayStation because I did not adopt a PS2 until 2005. and you know PlayStation games were very cheap at this time you could get them for five ten bucks over at GameStop

and like I said I found Symphony of the Night around this time I was digging into a large background backlog because I did not get a PlayStation until roughly 1999-2000s so I had a lot of games to catch up on suffice it to say but I was still playing PlayStation pretty regularly games like Valky profile and the various Final Fantasy as well into 2004 Because that's what you do when you're a poor college student. You play whatever you have, and I had a PlayStation.

The games are getting pretty cheap. Jeremy, were you a PlayStation gamer in 2001? I'm trying to remember what on PS1 I would have played. You know, because I was so bouncing around the country, like basically from April through October, I was really kind of without roots. So I didn't do a lot of console gaming. The GBA was definitely my go-to for,

most of the year. But, you know, I didn't, I hadn't thrown away my, my PS1. I remember playing, spending a lot of time with the Arc the Ladd collection in 2002. Yeah. So, you know, I was still keeping that around. Maybe, I think there might have been a Mega Man X game, maybe X, X, 6, X, X, 5 or X6 that came out. I think X5 was before I moved. So I think it was X6 that came out in 2001. And it was just a pure heap of crap. It was terrible. And it's disgusting. You can play it today on many re-releases. And yeah, so...

You can, but you don't have to, and therefore you should not. It's never been cheaper, though. But, yeah, the PlayStation 1 would be a lot of until around like 2003, at least, but not the case for the N64, because just like the PlayStation, the last big games for the N64 came out in 2000. Nintendo was killing time before their next big hardware came along in the fall of 2001. So it was a pretty dry year for the platform, but there were three big games. Those were the U.S. releases of paper. Mario won in Pokemon Stadium 2.

And the last major release for the console was Conquers Bad Fur Day in like the fall of 2001, the last big pre-GameCube game to hold you over. And in my research, I could not find any 2002 and 64 games. So I want to say 2001 was the shotgun to the back of the head of the system. I believe it was Jeremy's coverage of Paper Mario that really got me on the bandwagon for it ahead of the release of the new console. I remember Jeremy's great writing of saying, like when you play Paper Mario

and just see how fast you can save in it and how quick all this stuff works, it's the N64 realizing too late that it should have been it actually would have been a really good JRP console. I did a lot of playing the N64 in the year 2001 because it's the year I got one. My friend gave me his for, I don't know, like 20 bucks, and it was a fire sale on N64 games at this time.

So yeah, I did a lot of catching up with the N64 this year. Kat and Jeremy, any like N64 memories of this time right before it died? I never owned an N64, but I do remember that around this time, the N64 was definitely feeling pretty long in the tooth, especially if you owned a PlayStation. It just felt like the PlayStation was far ahead in every single metric to the N64. So as much as I love Starfuck 64 and still love Starfuck 64, I was definitely not thinking of the N64. I was waiting for the GameCube to come out. Yeah, I played, you know, obviously Henry Kennedy gave this away.

I played Paper Mario and really loved it. But I think that's pretty much all I did with my N64 in 2001. That was basically the point in which I was like, well, I am happy to be done with this goodbye. Farewell, N64. I will say I acted better than Shrek, but I was not better than Conquers Bad Fur Day because me and my friends like played it together in my living room and just enjoyed it together and laughed at every, every joke now that either seems like immature or insensitive or just like cliche of like it turned into the Terminator and then they did the Matrix jump like all that stuff. I just did really enjoy how Conquer was this hodgepodge of just like hyper inside jokes. The last time Rare could get away with that much bullshit in one of their games. I do enjoy how it promised South Park humor and it gave you some of that,

but it was a lot of very northern UK humor on top of that with these impossible to penetrate accents. So I did enjoy Rare kept their funky attitude, but it did still give you all the poop jokes on top of that. It definitely needed subtitles because you already have a thick northern ink. accent and then you put that through like the N64 sound capabilities, almost inaudible. And I have to plug fangamer because

my wife Nina Matsumoto co-designed a t-shirt of Conquer. It looks like a real like spring break 91 t-shirt. And there is a Conquer plushy coming out too with the original voice. So that's available if you want a little Conquer in your life. For the Dreamcast, so a day that would live in

infamy is January 31st, 2001. The Dreamcast is discontinued. And Sega officially becomes a third-party developer. Now, I didn't really ever look too much into this on the business side of things, but to make things, to some things up in a very simple way, Sega essentially had to lay off a third of their staff, and they only really survived because the president of the company died that March and basically forgave their debt because he personally lent them money to keep the company going,

and then he, like, gave all of his stocks to Sega from his company and Sega stocks when he died. So it was almost a billion dollars. A billion American dollars. Pretty wild. And I didn't know this, but only because that guy died, is Sega still around? That is insane. Incredible. Yeah, that Sega's stuff would have just been sold off piecemeal.

And, man, that January 2001 being the end of it, it reminds me of just playing Yakuza like a dragon. And in that game, when it becomes 2001, everything goes wrong for that guy. And now I feel like it's an inside joke about just saying his history. You know, I never thought of that, but that's true. And this is the year that I also bought a Dreamcast because they were going for on sale. I caught up with the Dreamcast. And yeah, because so many games were in the works, a lot of them were canceled. But so many games came out in 2001, but only one game in America came out in 2002 for the Dreamcast.

And that was a hockey game, NHL 2K1. So this was really in America, the final year of the Dreamcast. And it was just MIA after. that. My younger brother, giant Dreamcast Superfan, and we played so much Dreamcast. He got it 9-9-9-9. And we played it for so long. And he was very sad about this also because he had just gotten into PSO, like big time he was into that. And we played every fighting game. But then because of that discontinuation, in 2001 saw us by a lot of

marked down Dreamcast games playing a lot of weird stuff like a favorite of mine now Sega bass fishing which I never would have

purchased at full price I forgot the tragedy of that date is that Fantasy Star Online was released in America two days before the Dreamcast

was discontinued yeah sorry Kat I heard you trying to butt in here I was just saying that Sega bass fishing is a classic

oh yes the controller rules I totally agree. The controller makes it. It's all those wonderful arcade controllers on the Sega Dreamcast. But I had, I was like you, Bob. I bought a Sega Dreamcast right when I heard

that it was being discontinued. And I really loved it, actually. I played Marvel versus Capcom 2 on it. And I played Soul Calibur on it. I played a lot of fighting games. I played Grandia 2. I played Skies of Arcadia. And it gave me many, many, many,

many hours of entertainment and some years later when I was working for a US gamer I actually talked to Jake Casdahl and Miziguchi and everything and they talked about where they were at when they heard that the Dreamcast

was going to die and everything so you should go read that article because they still feel pretty emotional about it. People love the Dreamcast it's a fan favorite. It inspires emotions in people in ways that few consoles seem to do. It's true. And the last console I want to talk about is the Game Boy Color.

So Nintendo is getting ready to launch the Game Boy Advance this year. We're actually recording an episode about that today. You'll hear that later in the year. But it feels like a relatively normal year for the Game Boy Color at this point in its life. There's lots of licensed trash, but also big releases like Pokemon Crystal and also two new Legend of Zelda games. And Pokemon wouldn't actually make it onto the Game Boy Advance until 2003. And there wouldn't be a Zelda game on the GBA until 2005 when the DS was out. So these were big, important installments in these franchises.

It felt like Pokemon was starting to wind down a little bit, or maybe the craze was over, and it would be a few years before the craze would pick up again. I mean, it was still going, but I remember I was firmly off the Pokemon train by the time Crystal came out. I was a, I don't think I played Crystal, but I was a disliker of the first Game Boy Advance installments. I think we disagree harshly on that cat. Is that right? Oh, no, I dislike Ruby and Sephora. They're not very good.

It got good around Emerald is when it got good. I was just double-checking the dates online, but it was late 2000 was when the Game Boy Color Pokemonified ports of Dragon Warrior 1 and 2 were released in America. And so that was mainly my Game Boy Color was my Dragon Quest machine. And by the time three came out, I was just playing Game Boy Color games on my GBA. Yeah, it was a de facto GBA game. I played a lot of three, and I think that was a 2001 release in America for the Game Boy Color. But yeah, any other final thoughts on the Game Boy Color, Jeremy, you were probably doing your Toasty Frog 2D site at this point, or are we like past that in your timeline?

I don't remember exactly, but again, I kind of tapered off. Like I, you know, moved across the country pretty early in the year and sold off a bunch of my stuff on eBay, really regretting that, copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga, I let go for 250 bucks, which seemed like a lot then, but now it's just, you know, chump change. If I could find a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga complete for $250 at the moment, I would go for it in an instant. But yeah, I kind of, there was a big chunk of the year where I didn't really play that much, and it was mostly Game Boy Advance. I definitely played through both of the Oracle's, Zelda Oracles games on GBA because, you know, I wanted to get that life ring and the time ring.

But, yeah, otherwise, you know, I played, let's see, PS2, I played Clanoa and Zone of the Enders and a few other games. But, yeah, pretty much it's just kind of like a big empty void of video gaming for me, which is sort of unusual in my adult life, but it was an unusual year. Okay. So we're going to take a brief break. When we come back, we'll talk about the games of 2001. The Award The Award winning Go Nintendo podcast is the best place to get the news on the world of Nintendo. We cover the biggest stories, share impressions of the latest games,

and answer your burning questions. There's also some general pop culture talk, game music trivia, a heaping helping of silliness. And did I mention our sassy robot companion? I'm the star of the show. Catch new episodes of the Go Nintendo podcast every Saturday on the Greenlit podcast network. Retrograde amnesia is a comprehensive podcast about classic Japanese RPGs. Each season, we cover a single game, chapter by chapter, beat by beat. covers Xenogiers. Season 2 covers Krono Cross. Each episode we play a section of the game and unpack the story, mechanics,

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of us. Available weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Thank you. So we're back from our break, and we're in the year 2001 again, and the sixth generation of consoles has finally begun with the launch of three new platforms, the Game Boy Advance, and we won't go too far into that because we're literally recording an episode about that today, so we hear all about it then. But yes, the Game Boy Advance is new in the year 2001. And we also have the Xbox.

Microsoft failed to buy all the companies they wanted, so they just made their own. video game company and we have the Xbox. The Xbox is upon us and it's still a very big platform for gamers. Physically, quite a huge thing. It never stopped being huge. Well now now though they have got

Sony beats in actual design of a console. Yeah, that PS5 I kind of hate how it looks even though it's in my... I'm looking at it right now it looks like a spaceship in my entertainment center. I did like the tweet I saw this morning where someone's kids had drawn all over there at PS5

with crayons. Oh, yeah, it was cute. Yeah. I was like, you know, you could probably sell that to someone, you know, now that you've, you've gone viral with it. But, yeah, the, the Xbox kind of, you know, Microsoft kind of got into the industry by stepping over Sega's corpse in a lot of ways because they sort of supported Dreamcast with Windows CE.

But, yeah, some of the stuff I've read has made it sound like they were kind of using. their connection with the Dreamcast to sort of drive a wedge into the industry and jump in that way. And they did try... I think Goldberg had an oral history of Xbox just recently that is worth reading. There's a lot of interesting details

about things, including how Microsoft tried to buy both Nintendo and Square Enix and were basically laughed out of the room. Yeah, that's what I wanted to bring up that these things are now on the record. And you can see how they were just trying to do what they did best in the 90s is just buy things, acquired things and people were

resistant to it I guess. And now that's finally starting to work more for Microsoft. Like they have been, the last three years have been an acquisition bonanza for Microsoft, which funny to think 20 years ago, they tried and failed with so many, though they did buy

and ruin some companies in the early 2000s. I also at the time of this recording, January was the 20th anniversary of the CES where Bill Gates and The Rock revealed the Xbox together. That's right. Great video. That's got to be online. Was that the one where it was a giant golden X or was this beyond that point? I can't remember if that was the prototype. I believe it was what looks like the real console.

Oh, okay. Yeah. And just seeing, it's just wearing an Xbox jacket. Oh, God. Yeah. And the same year seeing Bill Gates sell it himself. Like they, they recognized that Bill Gates that it was like they leaned in as the term would later be called of like it was going to be called the bill gates machine anyway and definitely on uh the forums i was on people were like micro dollar sign they're trying to shift yeah micro shaft yeah actually so the launch of the xbox that was my first day of work at my video game store job and i walked into the store when it was full of green and black balloons it was just like a ghost town so i was like this this Xbox is going nowhere and i was already predisposed to like the japanese things more so i'm like an american console high in a pig's eye but then i became a big fan of the xbox 360 and uh not so much a fan of the xbox one but uh yeah it's xbox is still with us 20 years later the the my friend uh is

has his picture in game informer from that month because he was the first person in minnesota to buy an xbox wow you know he was famous i uh i recall i was a game cube super fan and i was like, I'm never going to buy the Xbox. Why would I ever do that? And then my friends who I thought would be playing every game with me on a GameCube, one of them made a new friend with a guy who had an Xbox and was like, you have to play Halo. There's this thing. So like, I'm going to sound like a total like dork who only played console games because I was.

But through Halo, that's where they're like, so there's this thing called a land party. And you can put the Xboxes together and play on multiple. TVs. It's 16 player. And I had to join in the fun. I had the disposable income from my new job. It was pretty cool. You're not going to lie. I had a good time begrudgingly.

I wish we were all just having fun on the GameCube like before. But I guess we're going to play Halo. I never went to a land party. So I missed the smell of all those radiating CRT TVs and all the disgusting snacks in the same room as sweaty men. They should bottle that scent

and sell it as chemical warfare. I spent a lot of time at land parties in 2001 as the one girl. It was a lot of fun, actually. I missed it. For all the nerdy things I did in 2001, like anime conventions and things like that, I totally missed that on land parties. And then, so yeah, we do need to have an Xbox episode. I think we'll do one soon because that's a gap in our podography.

Yeah, that's scheduled for toward the end of the year, don't you worry. Excellent, because I know Jeremy, you're a Halo boy, and we're going to talk more about Halo later. But also GameCube. So we did a GamePoop episode back in episode 155, so not a lot of new thoughts, but what kind of shocked me when doing the research for that episode that I produced was just how much of an intense, massive failure that system was. But going into it, I was like, it didn't do so bad. I enjoyed it, but you look at the numbers and they're staggering. They are, it did so, so bad. But it was much better than the Wii U in terms of sales ultimately.

So it's not the biggest failure for Nintendo. Not by much, but, yeah. Well, and it got an actual, like, real lifespan, not the half-lif span that the Wii U got. So, yeah, I was a GameCube day one buyer. I was very excited for it. And surprisingly on day one, when I played more of, I thought I would play the most to Luigi's Mansion, but we stayed up all night with Super Monkey Ball. And that was quite, I mean, that was just the excitement of I turned on a GameCube machine,

a Nintendo machine, and saw the Sega logo. Who could have ever imagined such a thing? Mario and Sonic were shaking hands at E3. Peace would come in 2001 for some groups. So let's talk about, oh, go ahead, dear. I have a, you know, kind of fond memories of getting my GameCube, which was when I went to Japan at the end of the year for Christmas, that was my Christmas gift, was the Japanese Spice Orange GameCube

and picked up Pickman and Smash Brothers and Luigi's Mansion while I was there it was very about playing Smash Brothers and within 10 minutes was like I actually genuinely hate this game but Pickman Pickman I bought just on a whim and it was so good I really enjoyed it but yeah

like that's such a cozy little system and I always think of you know being in a cozy little Japanese apartment with a Kotatsu and no insulation and just kind of like playing these games for the first time and being like oh I really like this That's so incredible, Jeremy.

Oh, my God. Being in a Japanese apartment with a Kotatsu playing GameCube on its launch. Holy cow. It wasn't the launch. It was a few months after because it launched in Japan actually on September 11th. That's true. It would have like December. So like three months down the road.

But still, you know, it was very early days. And it was just, you know, it was a very cozy, memorable experience. Very nice. You were living the fantasy life once again. I remember that the Xbox and the GameCube. They were the dueling consoles, but the Xbox just destroyed GameCube in terms of marketing. And everybody was basically talking about how you cannot find GameCube stations and stores. It felt like there were no GameCube commercials on the television.

Xbox was just steamrolling it. And basically from the start, the GameCube was being treated as a crisis for Nintendo. Yeah, like working in game retail at the time, I noticed that as time went by after the launch, the Xbox section was getting larger and being moved to. towards the front of the store and the GameCube section was getting smaller, moved towards the back of the store. Yeah, I experienced the same working in a blockbuster video

as somebody who enjoyed the GameCube, seeing its space shrink and shrink and shrink to make more space for the Xbox and PS2 sections. It was sad. So next I want to talk about notable releases in 2001. These were determined by me. So I don't want to hear anyone say,

I can't believe you forgot because, number one, you can believe it. I don't believe you. I know you can believe I forgot something. So put the comment down. So these are games that I feel were the most culturally important games of 2001. We can all agree or disagree. But number one on my list, this is in no order. But I think this is number one is Grand Theft Auto 3.

Just one of the most culturally important games of all time to the point where Grand Theft Auto 5 is the second best-selling game of all time under Minecraft. Like this series has only gotten bigger over time, which rarely ever happens with a series, with a video game series. I'm just looking at this list, and all I can say is, holy smokes, what a year. People don't usually talk about 2001 in the same reverent tones as say 1998, but 2001 was a vintage freaking year.

And Grand Theft Auto 3, I agree with you, Bob. Like, it's not the best game in the series, but it is a landmark milestone that in many ways changed games forever. Because, I mean, we knew about Grand Theft Auto before that. We played Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2, people were like, yeah, whatever. But turning into that 3D sandbox, that was a true next-gen experience that we were having for the first time in 2001. And it was exclusive to PlayStation 2. And so PlayStation 2 just had this freaking Murderer's Row lineup compared to the GameCube and the Xbox.

And none of those consoles really had a chance. They had Grand Theft Auto 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy 10, just bang, bang, bang, bang. bang yeah at this point in my life i was going to a game store probably once a day and when i saw this show up not really knowing what it was i was like oh yeah i played those first two granth thought it was they were kind of bad i guess they made another one who cares and then the reviews started coming out and people online started telling stories of what you can do in the game and then i was in a funco land and it just had been banned in australia and the guy was like you better buy this now or else you know you don't know what's going to happen next so that's when

i bought it and that's when i fell in love with the series because it was just so so new and a different experience and other games had tried to make these open world this was like the first convincing open world to date in my experience it was like in a viral one as it yeah but you know pre-social media but it was a friend would come and tell you like dude have you heard of this in my when i played gta three i did this and then i did this and then this and then this they all would very rarely talk about anything involving story in that game it was just Like, and then I did the cheat code to summon a tank and you know you got to shoot the tank backwards so you can actually move faster and stay away from the cops. And like it was, uh, it just turned into these like fever descriptions of a game with the express thing in there of like games don't do this.

You've never done this in a game before. And I mean, this was the jackass era of America too. And it was like our generation was growing up of like, hey, yeah, you can't tell me what to do, mom. was this kind of ethos that you could play through in Grand Theptado 3. And it was a fun hangout game too because you could just play and see how far you could get before you got arrested or killed and passed

the controller to a friend of yours and they would play too and you can see just the many different things you could do in the game that are happening naturally. Jeremy, I think you were a big fan of this game from the beginning, right? Not actually from the beginning. I remember having been vaguely aware of the first

couple of Grand Theft Auto games thinking, yeah, I don't I don't really care about this. And then, you know, kind of the early commentary I saw and it made it sound really just antisocial and miserable and not something I wanted to play, but someone submitted an article for one of my zines on it. And it sounded intriguing. And then I think, you know, the following year, I was visiting someone out of town and they had the game.

And so I, like, they just started up a fresh game of it. And immediately I was like, oh, I get it. I get what this is about. This is really interesting. So, yeah, I picked up a copy for myself and played it and tried to write some offbeat stuff about it. Like I remember writing a very brief blog series about the experience of trying to play Grand Theft Auto 3 without committing any crimes, which is just a futile endeavor.

I did read that, yeah. I think it was, yeah, I don't even remember what I called it. But it was basically just like, you know, I'll go and do like fire truck missions and stuff. And that'll be okay. But I'll always stop at the stoplights and I won't hurt anyone. And it was just a pointless way to play the game. So, you know, it's fun to do stuff like that. Yeah, but very important.

And in good ways and bad, in bad ways, it did sort of restart the violence and video games discussion, which fizzled out once again in 2005 with another Grand Theft Auto-related thing, the hot coffee, quote-unquote, scandal, which that could be an episode. it probably will be another episode but it was frankly embarrassing for everyone involved every politician involved just publicly shamed themselves

just how ignorant they were about this topic but at the same time that was when quote unquote violence in video games went to another level and it kind of reflected how for the lack of a better phrase games were growing up at this time they were firmly in their crazy teenage years

and Grand Theft Auto 3 embodied that Biff pow video games aren't just for kids anymore But just like how you can laugh at Lieberman freaking out about Nighttrap, it is fun to see people freaking out about these puppet people in Grand Theft Auto 3, these vaguely human figures made out of triangles, you know, cutting each other's heads off and shooting each other. Yeah, I mean,

you'd hear the stories of, I remember the big one that would upset people was hearing, you could have sex with a sex worker and then kill that sex worker to get your money back. and that one i mean that is uh pretty horrifying uh to to describe but uh yeah i i also to really feel dated i remember working in an amc movie theater and in the break room which was a sizable break room uh there was a tv in there and i remember one day uh the daytime tv was on and it was montel williams doing a piece i'm like this grand theft auto game it's it's horrifying isn't it and we all the young people in the break room

were like, we didn't even know the scariest shit that's in that game, man. Yeah, we are definitely overdue for another Grand Theft Auto episode. I think the last one was during the one-up era. So look forward to that at some point in the future. We did one early on in the reboot era, but that was like seven years ago.

Yeah, so that's why... That long? Holy cow. That's why I can't remember. Well, we need to cover it again at some point. The interesting thing about Grand Theft Auto is that once you play it, you realize all these things people were freaking out about, like killing having sex and then killing the person you had sex with you get your money back

was not a deliberate design choice it was just emergent gameplay that someone realized oh i can do this but it was just a consequence of all the systems they put in place so yeah i think the the the world wasn't quite prepared to deal with you know that that concept of video gaming like hey things like there are systems and they work together and sometimes you can like you know make use of those in ways that seem horrible, but weren't really necessarily intended that way. So next on our list is Halo Combat Evolved. So this is not the first console FPS, but the first one to make the console FPS feel natural. And I basically established the grammar for the console FPS by making the right stick look, left stick move sort of thing, the de facto way you play all of these games.

And it wasn't until I played these games 10 years later that I realized how important they were. just all of the things that were established here just became the de facto rules for this genre on consoles, especially things like where the fire buttons are and things like recharging health. These are all pioneered or at least popularized with Halo Combat Evolved.

And I think we definitely need a Halo episode. Jeremy, I know you're probably the biggest Halo fan here, at least of the older games. There's also one of those, basically if we're talking about it in this episode, there's probably going to be an episode scheduled later this year. Like, if you check the schedule,

Halo is definitely on there. Okay. I don't have the schedule open in front of me, but I have to assume there was going to be a Halo 1 coming soon. Absolutely. Halo 1 was my first real experience with that modern control scheme. And I remember feeling like it was the, you know, patting your head, rumming the stomach kind of thing.

It didn't really make a lot of sense to me, especially since I was coming off the, you know, the PlayStation, the dual shock, that kind of thing. And I remember thinking that there were so many buttons on this gigantic controller and so I was trying to parse it all in my brain and it took a while for me to actually be able to adapt like Halo felt very complicated when it came out in a way that really alienated me yeah I will say that it seems very simple these days now that we've had 20 years of time pass but the whole one stick moves one stick looks that lost so many people I knew that's

where they stopped playing video games because that idea was just it was too much for them to you know the learning curve was too strong for them. And I remember playing games like Turok and Gold and I where you could have that option, but it just felt so awkward with the C buttons. Yeah. I had friends who described it as like, it's like you're flying your head. Like that's what you're doing.

And although I remember when I played Halo for the first time, like the start of had one of the most ingenious things I'd ever seen at the time of like that you, it decides if you're inverted or not by just telling you like, look up. Whatever you press for up,

to let us know what you think up is and they invert or not from that. And obviously they can change it. Yeah, no, it's funny because for me, like jumping into the dual analog setup, the control scheme was totally natural because it's something I'd been trying to get shooters to do for years on personal computer, you know, playing on Mac or whatever. Because I had played dissent back in like 1994 or 95 and used a flight stick for it.

And that's a game where you're moving around with like the, I think the D-pad and then you have a flight stick and you can move through 360 degrees of rotation. So, you know, that's way more complicated than this. And it just seemed like such a natural approach that I was always trying to get like a, you know, a USB or I guess back then it would have been like a serial port controller to be configured so that it would work with a first-person shooter that way. And it never quite worked. So when Halo came along, it totally felt like the most natural thing in the world to me. Although ironically, I've never actually played the game on the original Xbox. I waited because I was a dyed in the wool bungee fan who had played them on Mac.

I waited for the Macintosh version of Halo before I played that. And then I've gone back and replayed it on Xbox 360, but never actually on the original Duke controller. Yeah, I've never done that either. I played it on the 360 re-release or whatever, or like playing it backwards compatible. I agree. I believe it's friend of Retronauts. Mark McDonald said that, like, the Duke is the, was made for Halo, and it just feels, it feels like Halo to me specifically the Duke more than even the 360 controller because that second stick has like a little cross on it, you know, and it, it felt terrible for many other games, but for Halo, it felt perfect for like aiming with the second stick. It felt like that original controller had a pop-a-matic bubble in the middle of it or something.

Yes, yes, it did. Okay, five. You get to go five spaces. Yeah, the... Oh, God, it's so good. I think that you're right, Henry, that was made for Duke, or Duke was made for Halo, just like the GameCube controller was made for Pickman. And, you know, that doesn't necessarily translate to game experiences,

good game experiences on other, for other games. But for those very specific experiences, you're like, oh, yeah, this is perfect, this is it. Halo took over college dorms around this time in a way that made it, It continued to be probably the most popular game in the dorms when I was going to school from like 2001 to 2004 thereabouts. And the question that I have is, if Halo had not been there with the Xbox at the launch at the start,

would the Xbox have failed? I would say yes. I think you're right. It was a killer app. There would not be another console launch killer app until I think we sports. And the Xbox had like two games when it came out. And Halo was the one that mattered.

They advertised a lot with Abe's Odyssey or whatever the Abe game was. There's a bunch of the Odyssey, wasn't it? Yes. Yes. And I remember, like, Halo was not what was in the demo unit at our store. It was always dead or alive. I don't know if Halo was like an Mrated game.

That's why we couldn't have it on the floor in the front. I can see that. Yeah, I think it was Emery. Yeah, it was. So me and all my nerd bros, we played hundreds of hours of perfect dark. We were the super fans of FPS's. on the N64. We were super into, and we thought that would continue on to the GameCube. And then, of course, the start of 2002, we find out that rare, it gets bought by Microsoft,

so that was really not going to happen. But that's why, like, in late 2001, when my friends were telling me, like, no, dude, Halo is this. Like, if we want to have this experience, like we had on Perfect Dark together on a shiny new game, it's Halo and you better buy an Xbox. Oh, yeah, it was mature rated. So that's why it was never on display at her store. So I want to speed through some of the other games on this list just because we've had episodes about them and talked about a lot of these games, frankly, too much sometimes. So Metal Gear Sulla 2, Sons of Liberty, a huge game in 2001, one of the technical showpieces of the PS2's hardware, a very challenging story, a very bait-and-switch game that angered a lot of people.

I was there when people were trading them in, and they were mad at me. I didn't even sell them the game, and they were mad at me. But yeah, we've talked a lot about this game, so we don't need to talk that much more. We haven't actually done a full episode of Middle Gear Solid 2, but that is also scheduled for later for the 20th anniversary. We're going to do a deep dive like we did with the first game. I want to

replay it, so this will give me an excuse. I think it's even more significant after this past year than it was even like five or six years ago. It's crazy how much more relevant this game, like in its messages and its ideas keep becoming. Not on a good way either.

Yeah. What did you do to us? We just live in his world. that's how it is. I can't believe Death Stranding was just well here's next year get ready so yes

after that we have on my list Eco it was one of the first mass market art games developed by a relative nobody who would follow up with one of the greatest games of all time

and of the generation not a major sales hit it's sold okay but I think a major influence on game development especially if you look at things that directly spawn like the Souls series

that would not exist without Eco and so thank you to Eco hats off to you sir and also the how Sony markets a prestige game too like you can see the the kindling of it there that they they start marketing things is like well this is you know like how sopranos is for grown-ups this that's what eco is too they still denied it a cool cover in america but uh they at least released it here which was

nice uh silent hill two is my next game on this list we just did a whole episode about that in the summer uh very interesting game in terms of the narrative but also a very pretty game that's only just starting to look dated in recent years. So another Konami just, they really knew how to make PS2 games

in this era. It's the defining one in the series. Definitely, yes. Without a doubt, without question, I think people would say it is just the best

game of the series. Next one on my list is Super Smash Bros. Mele. So this was my Halo. This is what I played a ton of. So we had a

Smash Brothers episode last year, but my own thoughts are the N64 game established the concept. This one is just the foundation

from which the rest of the series would be built to the point where some people prefer this one and because of that, Nintendo has to make sure your GameCube controllers

will work on every version of the game after that. It was such a large leap over the N64 version in terms of graphics, in terms of music, in terms of things to do, in terms of the character roster.

It was the game to be playing. But what was really funny was that when melee came out, people were treating it as kind of a second tier or third tier release compared to a typical Mario game. And I remember some magazine like going, oh, Halo's

beating every single one of Mario Nintendo's characters at once. But Super Smash Bros. Melee was the fixture for me when I was in college. My friend would bring over his GameCube and we would sit in our dorm room together, my girlfriend, him and me, and we would all play

melee for hours and hours and hours and hours and freaking hours. This was by college game. It seemed limitless the amount of content in it. And this is one of the two games. So like this and Pickman did not make the GameCube launch. They were like two or three weeks out. If this had launched with the GameCube, I don't think it would have

helped that much, but I think the GameCube would have done much better if there was a Smash Bros. After the GameCube, it was basically a launch window game. Yeah, I think that's when I learned the term launch window for that in Pickman. I remember excited, yeah, me and my friends we played the N64 one

a lot because it felt like a game that would only come out in Japan and you'd hear about, but then we got it. And so when Malay came out so soon and we were going to get to play it not six months or a year after Japan got it like with the N64 1 but within the same

month we were so excited and everything you know got spoiled from the Japanese release that was that was probably also what dragged me onto the internet too was like okay they've got it in Japan for like a month or two what are all the characters in melee and then finding out that like we

get Marth the character in the series we've never gotten in America who is Roy And also this, as a big Nintendo nerd then and now, I felt like I was rewarded for being a know-it-all because this was also the debut of trophies where it's just like, I thought only I knew that. Just all of the deep cuts, like this is just not only a fighting game,

but a love letter to the history of Nintendo and every game since then has been that. So yeah, this is where it really started for the series, is melee. Up next on my list is Max Payne. Didn't age incredibly well, but what it did bring to gaming was a slow-momic. mechanic, which, you know, obviously inspired by The Matrix, but think of how many other games would have a similar mechanic after this, and it all started here with Max Payne. After that, I have Devil May Cry.

So, in my opinion, I think this is the first action game to really feel satisfying in a 3D space, even though there were limitations with the pre-established camera angles. But I think Capcom figured out 3D Castlevania before Konami did. I felt like Devil May Cry games were what Castlevania should have been in 3D, never were. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was the saying like, well, Capcom knows how to make a Castlevania now. Like they can fit in. Yeah, that was such a cool game. I love just like the coolest of it in the replayability. And it's when I think Camilla as a director and his team really figured out like their gameplay loop as as designers too. And just also this, I'd interest in being cool and fun at the same time. And then, I mean...

They feel very different from Devil May Cry 3 in a lot of ways. It's a lot slower-paced, and the combat is a lot more deliberate than the kind of the crazier games that would come later in the series. It's a very bizarre game, and I replayed it somewhat recently. I do love the ties to Resident Evil in that, you know, the pre-established camera angles, the weird, like, mini-challenges. There's, like, a first-person underwater segment. Just like, they're trying out so many things in this game. And, I mean, so this would directly inspire things like God of War, and then God of War would inspire. Castlevania Lords of Shadow. So it all comes from here. Every like character action game

basically just starts here. Next on my list of 10 important games is a game that I don't personally care a lot about, but I know it's important. And that's Grand Turismo 3, A spec. This was a early PS2 killer app to the point where it eventually became a packing game. So there were special PS2 editions with this game included in it. And it was a huge game, the best selling game in this series at around 15 million copies. I have car friends growing up then who did

really love it, but when they describe it to them, I'm like, I don't like driving my regular car. I don't care about playing a version of that car, but I mean, they were gorgeous, gorgeous games, like, but that but they were also so strict that I think that's what

eventually made the appeal of its competitors like forts start to overtake it because it's like Well, Forza kind of breaks the rules that Grand Turismo really harshly puts on you. Yeah, I remember playing. Yeah, I talked to driving fans who say that Grand Turismo is arcade stuff. It's for kids. Oh, my God.

You got to play this, like, even crazier simulation. I'm like, okay, I'll just go with what you say. But to me, Grand Charismo is a sim here. Yeah. Yeah, I remember playing. I like the first one a bit for the novelty value. And I bought two. And I remember sitting there for, I don't know, two or three hours,

trying to shave off a tenth of a second off my time to beat this trial. And I'm like, what am I doing? This is ridiculous. It was just way too punishing for me. But maybe I wasn't very good at it. And last on my list of 10 games is Final Fantasy 10. This snuck out just around Christmas time of that year. And I will say, frankly, it never clicked with me.

In fact, when I was playing it at the ripe old age of 19, I was like, I don't like this Final Fantasy game. Am I too old for Final Fantasy? I still love Final Fantasy, but it was weird to not like one. at the time. And I still can't really pin down why, but I know we have people on this podcast who do like this game. I've come around to it. Okay, so I have this weird arcing up and down relationship with FF10. When I played it originally, I really enjoyed it. And then over time, I like kind of soured on it because it was like, it's too linear. It's like kind of slow. I'm

not sure that I like Tetus at all, et cetera. But now I've, we recently did a Final Fantasy ranking episode over on Acts of the Blood God. And, I put 10 a little bit low in the top 10, but when I look back on it, I'm like, actually, that was a really good game. It has such a rich world. I love Blitzball. I was reminded of little touches,

like being able to learn the albed language and being able to get additional context for the conversations that were happening if you decided to replay it. And then Final Fantasy 10 in 2001, that was a showstopper. It was a showcase game for the PlayStation 2. it was incredibly gorgeous

so in many ways in some ways it doesn't hold up but in many ways it does great soundtrack too the the production values on it it didn't really click with me or I'll admit but when I'd see other people play it like I didn't own a PS2 but when I saw it on other

at Friends Place I was like I was dazzled by the production values the step from 9 to 10 is incredible to see to hear full English voices in a Final Fantasy game felt incredibly special in 2001. Now it's like it'd be weird if it wasn't there, you know, but it was so different then.

And I don't know if this is the case now, but I remember for at least 10 years in polls of Japanese game players, this would be their favorite one. It'd always be their number one game. Jeremy, I know you have experience with this one. Yeah, according to Polygon.com contributor Jeremy Parrish, this was the 10th best Final Fantasy game out of all the numbered Final Fantasy so far. So low on your list.

No, I enjoyed this one. It's definitely an evolutionary dead end for the franchise. Yeah, I agree. And we kind of got a sequel to it, you know, direct follow-up spiritually in terms of gameplay in Final Fantasy 13, but then that,

you know, that went in all kinds of weird directions with its own sequels. It's a strange game, but you know, I really like the battle system, even though it is extremely not Final Fantasy, like you think of the active time battle system. And this one is more like front mission, like the front mission battle director worked on it and gave us a completely turner, yeah, turn base game, which, you know, is really kind of brilliant because it allows so much flexibility. It gives you so much

insight into turn order and allows you to swap out characters freely to make use of the character who's best suited for each situation. There's a lot to like about the combat the story is kind of like the puzzle dungeons are like it looks nice it still looks nice your grid was really fun actually it was very satisfying to fill in those little spheres

I had friends who would just spend all of their time trying to fill in every single one of the little spheres and then some years later when the international version came out they added the dark eons and everything and I think that kind of took the end game and the battle system to a new level

and in many respects makes me respect Final Fantasy 10 a bit more. Yeah, you can play that version now with the somewhat recent HD remakes that's available to English language players. That one is next on our ongoing series of deep dives and individual Final Fantasy games. I think for April of this year, so not too long. Maybe I will replay that as quickly as possible to be on that episode. The final dungeon, you can literally enter the final dungeon,

walk to the center of the room, and take on the final battle. You don't have to fight anything in that final dungeon, of the final boss. It's really weird. I like that design choice. So it's a time saver. so lightning round is coming up next just other notable games released in 2001 that didn't make my top 10 and we can just if you have something to say about the game just say it because i want to get through this really quickly because we're running out of time here but other big games in 2001 so ever quest launched in 1999 so we have some competitors like runescape which is still running to this very day and dark age of camelot all i know about runescape is that british people fucking love this game and the one time i've had international trip for a game site was because of RuneScape. I went to a RuneScape event. I had no idea who anyone was or what was going on and everyone got a massive flu at that event and I was sick for two weeks after and I had no memories of it at all. So RuneScape, people love it apparently. England did not treat you well. No, I won't be going back. We also have Ledge of Zelda games

I mentioned before, Oracle of Ages and Seasons. So very solid Zelda games built on the on the foundation of Link's Awakening, they were released with a sort of Pokemon strategy, but they are two distinct games, and I think people were confused by that. But these are two distinct games, and I hope to God we see a Switch remake of both of these because they are very, very high-quality games. I had Oracle of Seasons, and I remember thinking at the time that it felt like a rom hack of Link's Awakening. There was just something off about it that really bugged me. But I wouldn't mind going back to it on seeing how it holds up, because my recollection is that the dungeons and the puzzles were really, really good.

And they're very good. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of started life as a remake of the original Zelda. And it really does kind of come through because there's so much in that game that feels reminiscent of the original Zelda. But then it has the seasons element where you're kind of changing the world around, changing the overworld, which is like a more complex version of the dark light world from Zelda 3. And it's radically different from Oracle of Ages, which is very much about like trading quests and, you know, just a more elaborate dialogue-driven experience, whereas Oracle of Seasons is very action-driven. It's really interesting because I feel like these two games do kind of show two different facets of the Zelda series, even though they look alike. They really play pretty differently and focus on different aspects of the Zelda formula. So I think it's a really

effective kind of pairing that gives you like the best of both worlds separately. They're great. And the Guy who headed these games up is the current head of Zelda now under Al Numa. So he is the director of Breath of the Wild. This is where he started with these games. Up next on my list, Black and White, the game that promised everything delivered very little. And really it was Peter Moline who's first big fall from Grace after leaving Bullfrog. A great developer where he made great games striking out on his own, not so good for him. People like Fable, but this was a first big misstep.

I will say the black and white marketing campaign almost got me. me, but I didn't really have a PC that could play it then, but it was the first time the sweet, sweet words of Peter Molinue tricked me of like, well, he says he can do all this stuff. And sadly, I wouldn't learn a lesson from that. And two years later, I would be a fable purchaser and regretter. I did enjoy fable too, but I don't know how much he had to do with that. I feel like fable two is them fixing his lies pretty much. So up next, we have Castlevania Circle of the Moon So four years after Symphony of the

Nights, it's kind of like having that on your Game Boy Advance, unfortunately. Except worse. It is worse. I will give you that. But because of when it came out and the hardware that was available, you kind of had to always play this outside because it is such a dark game. Yeah, I owned this game when it first came out

and I got it around the same time as Symphony of the Night and I have strong memories of squinting at my screen and not being able to see basically anything when I was playing it and it made me really regret getting a launch GBA because frankly I could have waited a couple years until the SP came out but instead I didn't have enough money to buy a PS2 good job cat yeah I tried playing this when it first came out and later I tried playing a ROM event on my computer and I was like well I can see everything but the game still isn't better so that was my take on this one moon is kind of a popular one within Castlevania circles I feel like there's a certain type of Castlevania fan who really enjoys this game And then we also have on our list SIV 3 and I know that

Shivim, our friend Shivam just did a very big episode about SIV games with you, Jeremy, and I'm sure this came up on it. It was just about SIV 1, actually. Oh, just about Siv 1, okay. I'm going to fail everyone because this is one of the many Siv games I tried to play, but failed horribly yet, but I know this was a big

turning point in the series. Advance Wars, we talked about that already. I want more advance wars. I'm just so furious. It's just dead. Just a dead series. I feel like Nintendo letting all of those advance war copies beyond e-shop is their way of telling us like you're not going to make a new one

we won't stop these people It was just a big shrug And yeah, Warframe I hear is okay Warframe is the indie Oh wait, Wargrove It's got a lot of updates It's Wargroove Wargroove

Okay got you Warframe is like a free-to-play 3D kind of thing That's right, yeah Many games have the word war in them Wargrove's good There's also tiny metal. That's a good advance for copycat. Also on our list, we have Pickman, and we need an episode about this for sure.

So this really feels like the last big, important series, Miyamoto, spearheaded. And these are such well-designed games. And each one just barely gets made. But I think it's because it's Miyamoto's pet project that he's able to push these through. But apparently there is going to be a Pickman for as of 2017. So maybe we'll see that on the switch in the future. but who knows. And there is a

Picman episode scheduled for November. Oh my God. This is just a preview of the year of retrodice. You're going to want to stay tuned for these people. I plan things out a long way out.

You did. That's why I'm not aware of a lot of these because I don't have the schedule in front of me. Also on our list, we have the Ace Attorney series starts in Japan in 2001 on the Game Boy Advance

so not come over here until the DS remakes came out in 2005, but it basically basically took the Japanese menu-based murder mystery adventure games and gave it new life by adding action, by adding action-based elements in like kind of lively gameplay for a menu-based game. So this kicked off a series and kind of a mini genre of its own, where there are now Ace Attorney-style games. It really brought the genre into the United States once it finally did come out here. Not in 2001. I couldn't imagine a 2001 where such a specifically, Japanese genre that is so text-heavy getting a localization in the U.S. Like, it was a different time.

What changed with the Nintendo DS because, I mean, it wasn't that, things weren't that different four years later, but I mean, Ace Attorney managed to hit on the Nintendo DS with American audiences. What changed for the GDA? We'd all just gotten nerdier by then. We'd been playing Big Brain Academy and all of the brain training games and our brains were finally ready to read on a portable system. All that language, yeah.

I think the sort of casual focus of the Nintendo D. did a lot to open up games like this to people who didn't necessarily want hardcore action experiences who didn't have preconceived notions about what a video game should be. And also, you know, anime was getting big in America. And this, like that series is anime as hell. So yeah, I think, I think there were just a lot of things that worked in its favor four or five years later that just weren't present in the market in 2001. And also, you know, localization was difficult on Game Boy Advance compared to DS

because cartridge space was a lot more limited. So I think they were smart to wait until the DS came along to localize a series, even though it was frustrating at the time. I think so. This series does feel at home on two screens, for sure. And really quick, Wireland 4 episode coming soon,

but also Star Wars Rogue Leader. I believe this is also a big GameCube launch game, correct? Oh, yeah. What a gorgeous game. Like, you know, after it wasn't the deepest in content, but I could do that trench run 800 times in a row and still love it.

It was fun playing through all the different levels and getting high scores and unlocking different ships and everything and the thing that I find interesting about Rogue Leader was that it started off as basically a tech demo and then they, as a way to show that the GameCube

was really easy to develop for, they were like, we were able to develop this in like six weeks and then they just turned it into a launch game, an incredible launch game, very polished, If you're a Star Wars fan, it filled in some of the gaps between, say, the original movie and Empire Strikes Back. The prequels were just coming out at this time.

And it was really, the combat was very smooth. The set pieces were huge. It was the first really good rendition of the Battle of Endor, for example. Yeah. And, yeah, no, it was, and even now, it's still a very good looking game. You got to help the Bothan steal information for Mon Mothma, as referred to at the start of Jedi. You, I think, live through it, but they die. I know it was very popular at my game store.

People were buying this with GameCubes all the time. I mean, it was also just... I think it just reflects how strong the GameCube launch lineup actually was because we were getting Luigi's Mansion, Pickman, Super Smash Brothers Melee, and then Star Wars Rogue Leader, that's a heck of a lineup to start out a console. Yeah, yeah, and there was just something magical about, like,

I'd played Star Wars games for years before that, but I couldn't hear CD-ish quality versions of the John William's score while playing them. And so that actually was a huge impact on why I liked doing the trench run while hearing the John William's score really improved it for me. And finally, to wrap up, just I want to list some series that kicked off in the year 2001. So these series all started in this year, Red Faction, Golden Sun, Oni Musha, serious sam and tropico and of course the most important game of 2001 is floigan brothers episode one episode two coming soon someday let's kickstart that everybody how is that not being kickstarted yet nobody likes floig and brothers but yes thank you for listening to our retrospective

on the year 2001 i hope you enjoyed it and i'm hoping 2021 is a better year than both 2020 and 2001 so let's let's hope for the best but as for us at retronauts thanks for listening you can find us on Twitter at Retronauts. And of course, this podcast is supported by the Retronauts Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash Retronauts if you want to support the show. If you sign up at the $5 level, you get two bonus episodes, two full-length bonus episodes every month that are not available on the free feed. And you also can access a monthly, sorry, a weekly podcast and article by Diamond Fight, all available at the $5 level. When you sign up, you get immediate access to everything we've made at that level before you join. So we made, like,

24 or 25 bonus podcast in 2020 that you might not have heard and in the months of 2021 that you missed out on too. So there's a lot waiting for you there at the Patreon at patreon.com slash retronauts. Let's go around the virtual room here. Kat, I know you are a newcomer to Patreon. We welcome you aboard. Thank you very much. Yes, Ax of the Blood God is my podcast. It focuses on RPGs. We like Japanese RPGs, but we also talk about PC RPGs. That's Axe, not Axe. People were getting confused on that one. This is like a book of the Bible? People said that they were confused for a long time.

They thought it was like axe for some reason. I thought it was like a mispronunciation of ask. Like, oh yeah, what's the axe of the blood god this time? What's do you want from us? The blood god is very knowledgeable. But we record an episode every single week. And if you subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com slash blood god pod, you will be able to, at the $5 level,

We'll be able to get episodes a week early and ad-free. We also have a mini-series going right now called Television of the Blood God in which we do an episode-by-episode watch of The Witcher on Netflix. And finally, we're doing a monthly game club in which we do the Pantheon of the Blood God where we play an RPG, talk about it, and then ultimately decide if it should go in the Pantheon. And as of January, the game club this month is Lufia II. So if you subscribe at the $10 level, you can listen to. that whole dang episode.

Great. And Jeremy, how about you? Yeah, so you can find me doing this little podcast called Retronauts. You may have heard of it. It's pretty good. You can find it lots of places, but I'll let Bob tell you all about that. Oh, wait, he did, actually. So I can tell you instead that I'm also doing stuff with limited run games.

If you go and look at their YouTube channel, I've got videos there, and I'm writing stuff with their blog, and sometimes you'll buy a game, and you'll be like, whoa, this was written by that guy. I know him. There's also, let's see, my YouTube channel. which is under just by name Jeremy Parrish, where I'm going back through the chronological history of video game systems. This year is really focused on deep diving into early formative Japanese releases

before the NES launched with Famicom and Sega SG 1000. So if you are interested in extremely old video games, you can see videos with a guy talking very quietly and sedately about them. That's what I do. Henry, how about you? Well, if you like hearing me and Bob reminisce about things together, you will want to hear our two weekly podcasts that we also do support it at Patreon that is the Talking Simpsons podcast

where we go through every episode of The Simpsons in Chronological Order we're actually approaching the year 2001 with the episodes we're covering right now and our other weekly podcast is What a Cartoon where we cover a different animated series in deep detail and explain why we enjoy it or in some cases don't like it but usually we love it So, What a Cartoon in Talking Simpsons.

They're all on the free podcast machines you enjoy so much. And we have a ton, and I mean a ton of exclusive podcasts at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons to get in addition to all of that stuff, including our monthly What a Cartoon movie. Where for 10 bucks a month, if you wanted to hear me about talk for five hours about the end of Evangelion, you are welcome to do so. And I think we had a great time. I think so, too. Yes. Thanks again to everyone who listens. and we'll see you again very soon for another episode of Retronauts.

I don't know.