Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 164: Online Pioneer Days & Mailbag

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

A potpourri of topics this week as Ben Elgin and Benj Edwards talk Jeremy through the early days of dial-up gaming and BBS madness. Then, Shivam Bhatt and Bob help tackle a long-overdue listener mailbag.

This week's episode was supposed to be a micro episode, but it turned out so well, I've upgraded it to a full episode and tacked on a long overdue listener mailbag segment. So please enjoy. Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts Micro, and I think this one's really going to be micro instead of one of those like hour and 10 minute micros that isn't actually because we don't really have a plan for this one. Ben suggested we talk about our early online gaming experiences, and I can talk about that right now for myself. Okay, there we go. But some of us played online games more than the others. So I thought this would be fun just to do kind of an anecdotal, like, you know, here are my experiences kind of

episode. And you, I can talk about some stuff. Yeah, I got a few things. Anyway, guys, why don't you introduce yourselves? The main culprit here. Ben Edwards. I am the culprit who wants to talk about online stuff. And yes, what do you want me saying? I don't know.

Hi, I'm Benj Edwards. I run Vintagecom. And I write about computer and video game history and also network history, BBS history. a lot. So, I thought it would be fun. You seem like someone who would be very good to talk about this subject. Yeah. I mean, I've written about Prodigy and CompuServ and BBSs and the early web and the early internet. And I was involved with a lot of them myself. Well, there you go. And, and,

and, uh, I'm Ben Elgin. Um, I'm also old. So I was around with this early stuff was happening. And, uh, yeah, I spent some time, uh, spent some time on dialing BBSs, sent some time in early text based online stuff. So we got a few things we can talk about here probably. Cool. And then I am someone who got online in the early 90s and didn't use it to game. I don't know. I feel like it's deficient or something.

I just, I don't. Did you have friends to play with online? I think if you're online, you don't need friends. It did back then. Oh, okay. It wasn't like a matchmaking thing. You had to have someone to connect to. No, you know, around the time that I was getting into the internet, getting on the internet,

I was also getting into role-playing games. So, you know, if you're into Final Fantasy or something, you're not going to be playing that with someone else. That's true. There just wasn't much online that appealed to me. I played a little bit of locally networked Marathon and Doom. So you were a Mac guy. Same on my own.

We're into first-person shooters a lot. Yeah, in that era, I also did land, marathon, made some of my own, like, Marathon 2 level. Nice. So we actually had one that was, based on my undergrad dormitories all linked together with secret tunnels. Oh my God. Are you a school shooter?

Yeah, totally. You know, five years later, you would have gone to jail for doing that. Probably. And then, like, a little beyond that, I helped run some myth tournaments. Wow. So you were a bungee fan. I was a bunchy fan. We've probably talked about that at some point.

Yeah, we need to do a myth episode at some point. We should do a myth episode. I would totally do that. But, yeah, that was my first experience being told to get AIDS and die online. Neat. Yeah, but we actually... The internet's always been so. warm and supportive.

But except there was an expectation of having things moderated back then. So, you know, we kicked that guy off and it was all right. That's true, yeah. But we're getting ahead of, way ahead of what Bench was going to talk about. Yeah, well, I can go back to my earliest online experiences are from 1992. When I was only 11 years old, my dad brought home a modem, a 2400 bog modem. Yeah, yeah, I'm young. And my dad brought home a 2400 bod modem from work one day and said, hey, this is a modem.

can connect to other computers with it. And that was actually a little earlier because my brother was calling BBSs, which are bulletin board systems, which are individual systems running special software that people could call and connect to using a terminal emulator program. So it's all text-based. And there's only one person at a time on most of these systems because you'd had to have multiple phone lines to have multiple people calling at the same time. So what's a terminal emulator exactly?

Well, a serial terminal is. a character-based display, you know, input, output device that was invented to interface with early mainframe computers instead of like a teletype or something. So they had glass terminals that were CRTs instead of paper. And then that became a standard, the serial standard became a standard. And terminal emulators are a piece of software running on a computer that simulate that serial connection. Oh, I see.

serial, all the protocols involved with that. So you could be at home running like an IBM PC clone and it would be like you had a virtual Vax. You could dial into a virtual access, sure. You could dial into whatever mainframe remotely with a terminal emulator and connect to it as if you were there with the local terminal. And I was doing this for macOS at the same time. So I was in the high school in the mid-90s.

We also got had a modem starting with. the really slow one and getting progressively faster. There was actually a booming dial-in BBS scene in my area code, just kind of by coincidence. This was outside St. Louis. I think there was a lot of bored suburban white kids setting up their own servers just to have a cool thing that they ran. There's a lot of teenagers in my area.

Yeah, yeah. I called BBSs all summer in 92, and then in November or December, I decided to set up my own BBS, which I called the Cave BBS, and I started that, and I ran that all the way until February 98 when I just wanted to use the internet all the time on my second line instead of posting a BBS. Why the cave?

Is that a reference to Plato? Were you running your own Plato turmoil? Yeah, it was a philosophical thing about shadows and how reality is not really what you see. No, it's actually my handle was Red Wolf. And I figured, I picked Red Wolf because my brother's alien online was blue dragon and his favorite color is blue mine is red and so i just picked red wolf i guess and where does a red wolf live in a cave of course i see i see that's this is 11-year-old logic

i don't think they actually live in caves and there are real red wolves which i didn't know at the time they're endangered but they're native to north carolina i actually thought about setting up my own bbs but never quite got around to it i was going to like buy an old like 486 or something to have as a spare and set it up on there. But like I said, my area code was really kind of saturated anyway, so it would have been unnecessary. I think mine was going to be terminus, which was an Asimov preference. I was lucky I had a dad who supported my love of technology.

So he let me use a hand-me-down PC as my PBS computer. And I changed him out. I had a 286 laptop first, a Tandy laptop, and then he needed to use that again. And so then I went to an 80-86 IBM PS2 Model 25, which was insanely slow and monochrome and stuff. But it was a free computer, and I had no problem with that. And then I upgraded to 386 and stuff like that. But anyway, so the gaming element.

As for myself. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I played console games. Yeah. Okay. But the gaming aspect comes in on BBSs. It's not a one-on-one thing at that time.

Usually it was a, sort of time-shifted gaming experience. Because everyone was dialing in one at a time, so you had to have some setup where you could have people take turns and just come in and no matter who else had been in recently and pick it up.

And you had a time limit you could play and take some turns and then you'd get kicked off and the next person could dial up and use it. And so we had games like running on our BBS's like Trade Wars 2002 was very popular. Later, Legend of the Red Dragon was extremely popular.

Let's see. solar realms elite global war Operation Everkill 2 there's even a freshwater fishing simulator which was really cool but all these are asky text based and with antsy graphics we call them at the time using the IBM extended

character set to make graphical think of them as abstract emoji basically in basic geometric shapes and so you could end up having a program draw rudimentary pictures just by using these shape characters yeah so we I mean we

loved those games and they have more depth than a lot of modern games. I still play Trade War 2002 every once in a while. Every few years I get back into it because I still run a BBS since 2005 I think I've run a Telnet BBS called it Cavebbs.comit.net.net.

If you want Telnet there. I would. I'm curious to see. Do you have some maybe... Yeah, we should put this in the show. Asky nudes. Yeah, Asky Nudes. I used to on my first BBS a long time ago, I think. Everything was so tame back then. It's so funny.

What we thought was adult. What we traded was adult was like mostly bikini pictures. And there's some, you know, a couple playboy scans. One of the first huge, like, two-screen, asky art pictures that I ever downloaded was actually, I mean, it was a bikini picture. But it was, I didn't know at the time. It was actually a loan for Marseilla at Sura, just a digitization of one of her standard, like, character portraits, which we totally need to do an episode on. Yes. Okay.

I don't know I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm I'm I'm I'm

the I'm I'm I'm I'm and I'm So you want to focus on gaming or nudes?

Let's go back to the game. Let's go with games. Trade Wars, I feel like, was really the ubiquitous one. Like, everyone had Trade Wars set up. Oh, yeah. Trade Wars, 2002, that was the best version. There was an earlier trade wars that wasn't 2002. I'm assuming it was 2002 as like...

The year of 2002, because... But that's not the year it came out in, right? No, it came out. like 80. Sure, okay. Just making sure. Like, I wanted to be sure like we're calibrated

to the right time zone here. Yeah, that was wildly in the future somehow, even though it was only 15 years away or whatever. But I mean, when I was in third grade, which was like mid-80s,

I remember we had a drawing assignment where we had to draw what we would look like in the year 2000. And almost everyone in the class drew themselves as like old people with beards on the moon.

I was like, I'm going to be 24, 25. So I drew myself. of like, you know, just a bearded adult instead of an ancient man. Old people with beards on the moon. The year 2000, like, when you said to that in the 80s, it was just like, that's so far away.

I'm like, crap, now we're actually further away on this side of the year 2000 than we were when I drew that picture. So, geez. I think we inherited a little bit of that futuristic, like in the 50s and my parents were little, they were like, the year 2000. Yeah, that'd be doing, flying

cars. Yeah, and then, yeah, That became that. So, yeah, we were supposed to be exploring space deeply in different sectors in 2002. That did not come to pass. Yeah, I know. Didn't pan out. But, you know, if you want to know about trade wars, it's a turn-based strategy game where you pilot your own ship from sector to sector. A sector is just a discrete unit of space where you go different areas.

And there are ports where you can trade. you buy I think there's usually three things and I forgot what they are like hydrogen I don't know I played so many times I can't think of it right now it sounds a lot like Star Control 2 but I'm assuming much more simplistic

in terms of presentation yeah it's you see a text display of what sector you're in you're in sector 5 these are the exits to the different sectors if there's a port there or any ships there's nothing visual to it at all right

it's like almost like a text adventure that's happening and multiplayer real-time space? Except there are graphical splash screens. When you go to the Starport and you can go watch a movie to pay some credits to watch an animated antsy movie

where they make fun of Star Wars. And then there's a picture of an alien and some pictures of the ships you want to buy that are just block drawings in Ansee. And you try to buy low and sell high essentially and then you build up, you can build planets and upgrade your ship and buy a better ship

and blow up other players ships if they're vulnerable. It's kind of like mule actually. No. I wouldn't say it's like mule at all. It didn't have the resource management. It just doesn't feel like mule. It does have trading and stuff. But yeah, there's not not a resource management game. It's just

mostly trading game. There are others like Silver Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite were resource management simulators where you ran a kingdom or a planet or something and you had to manage that. Yeah, pretty much all of these games would be basically like text presentation but with some illustrations and you have to remember like a lot of the times people were connecting to these things on like like 1200 bod modems

which means you're only getting like you know hundreds of characters a second so there's not much you can do in terms of graphics but you can send over like a character illustration every once in a while or maybe some ones in sequence to be a little animated section but the interface is all going to be text yeah so it's line by line you know scrolling up off the screen as you play, usually. There are some that manipulate the antsy escape sequences, which are the characters sent to a terminal to position the cursor on the screen.

They manipulate them to have a static screen and you can kind of walk around in it. Like Legend of the Red Dragon 2 does that. Operation Everkill 2 kind of does it. It just scrolls, but it keeps the same position on the screen and makes it look like you're walking around on the map a little bit. We would even do those things just when posting. So the BBSs would have these, they would call them

door games because they're sort of the attraction to get people in and you could play them. But it was also, as the acronym applies, a bulletin board system. So the other big thing that happens is you just, you know, it's like a forum. You have all these boards. You can post on them. Only one person can actually be dialed in at a time, so it's all moves a lot slower. But you could pull these same tricks on a lot of the boards in the actual forum post. So you could embed characters in your post that would cause the cursor to back up and go back forward. So you could make, you could make little weird animations. You could have kind of semi-animated signature or something where it would type something and delete it and

type it again to pull these little weird animation tricks. We did that later on the mush. There's a multi-user simulated hallucination. Yeah, I want to talk about those too because I spent a lot of time in those. We isolated the antsy escape character sequence somehow, got it from some object illicitly. This is like a virtual world. This is like second life in text, a mush, like a mud where you can build anything you want. And so we somehow got control of this.

one character, it's the escape sequence, and we could append anything to it to do anything we want to manipulate someone's characters. So we figured out a way, on the who list of who's connected, you could write a message after your name that shows what you're doing, they call it. So we put a message there that would back up

and erase our name off the list. Is this where the carrot, h, carrot, h, carrot, h thing comes from? That's something that I saw when I first started looking at Usenet and reading fan fictions and things like that, and I would see that. And it took me a long time to realize that's like an escape character. Carite H is delete.

So if you see someone, if you see a post typed out that has like a word and then a bunch of Carid H's. It's basically at this point, someone saying, I am very old and still think in terms of BBS. So if you sent that sequence to an actual BBS, it would actually, when you read that post, because again, on a slow modem, you would see these characters coming over in real time. It wouldn't just be the screen appeared all at once. And so you would see this word type out and then delete and then retype something else. Yeah. And like I said, you know, if things were moving fast enough, you could make it look

like an animation or you can just do silly things where you said you were saying something and then saying something else instead. Yeah, control sequences could put your cursor anywhere on the 80 by 24 column screen. Yeah, if you got a car fancy with it. Change the text to blinking or colors or

you know, ring a bell, control G. Depending on what was supporting. Line feed is Control J, I think, and all that stuff. Yeah, it's all coming back to me. Yeah, Control H is delete. I know that. But, so that was the fun part of BBC saying there's lots of games where you

there were role-playing games on there like Operation Everkill 2 is a favorite Lord Legend of the Red Dragon was neat I didn't like it that much but everyone else loved it and you took turns and you battled and grinded your character up and

is there anything you want to add to that? We can talk forever about BBSS about mushes and mugs more because I spent a whole summer on those yeah so yeah you guys just keep talking this is like This is one of the rare instances where I've come into a retronauts, and I don't know really anything aside from like, you know, secondhand information, third hand information about stuff.

So this is really interesting. Thank you. I don't get to have this experience often. So let's back up on this one. So I think Muds was probably the first variant of it. So a multi-user dungeon. But then it kind of not all of them were like combat focused. So it sort of mutated into Mux, which is multi-user experience.

Or Bench was saying Mush, multi-user shared hallucination. Is that what that was? Yeah. Yeah, but it's like a backronym as much as just to play on Ludd and... Okay, so, but so what these were is, basically, interface-wise, if you think about something like Zork, right? So your basic text adventure where you have a bunch of locations, you can navigate between them, you can pick up and put down objects, you can interact with maybe some other, like, MPC actors, and it's all text presentation. So these were like that, but online, and a lot of them gave the... the player's the ability to edit the environment.

So, yeah, I spent a whole summer in a mux where you could just basically, like, stake out a spot within this game world and, like, build your own stuff. You know, you could build your own route. There were commands to basically let you edit the game as you were in it. And so you could build your own environment and build your own objects. And they usually had some kind of scripting language. So you can have it to have objects that interact back with you. You could, like, oh, and the one I was on, we could build vehicles that you could

get into and then navigate, like, while you were in the vehicle, and make NPCs. Build houses, built crazy things. Yeah. Secret Labs. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. I've connected to a mush the first time in 1994 through NC State's Data Switch,

where they had a free dial-up service for people to try to, it was really to call in to check their email sometimes or check the library catalog, but through the gopher system, which was a protocol that predated the web of menus, you could navigate it through to get to a telnet interface somehow. My friend figured out how to get to a way to telnet to these mushes that were on a different gopher somewhere else. Wait, you could use telnet through gopher? Yeah, they're all linked together.

Because it's all on this text-based terminal. It was all text-based. I would just tel-net directly. Yeah, I didn't have that ability. This was free. You weren't supposed to be able to type in anything, go and do anything you want. We had to use these backdoor tricks. Yeah.

So we figured out a way to a mush. And man, me and my friend, when I was 13 and he was 15, and we spent all summer, all day, all night on that thing, building and programming, game, you know, our own worlds. We'd build our own houses. We'd build our own cars that functioned in this text environment. Everything you're seeing is descriptions, like your car comes into the room, your car leaves.

You know, you're in the library. It has a description. You have 100 books and Laura's shiny or something. You know, and there are exits. You go into different rooms. And there's an inventory, like in Zork and other things. That's part of its mud heritage. Yeah, all the basic text adventure infrastructure was there.

Yeah. And the other thing about these is these were usually hosted, like, on a mainframe somewhere. Oh, yeah. As opposed to being a BBS where you just had one person tying up the phone line and dial in, you could actually have multiple people telneted in to the system at the same time. So you could actually have, it really was where you could. Hence the name multi-user. Hence the name multi-user.

So the BBS games. The BBS games were solo, single-player games. Asynchronous, yeah. So they weren't necessarily single-player. They could be multiplayer, but they were always asynchronous. You would log in and take your turns, and then other people would log in and take their turns, and it would tell you when you got back.

There are exceptions. People point this out, anyone who listens, that there were multi-line BBSs, especially later in the 90s when that became cheaper. There were games like you could play Trade Wars in real time with people flying around, but that wasn't in the golden era, usually. Yeah, because this was usually being run by teenagers on their parents' secondary line. people didn't have more than one second landline. Yeah, and you had to tie up your entire computer to do this, and they weren't cheap.

So a lot of people didn't have a, you were, you were letting them use your computer, you know, just to run BBS to do this. But on the mush, the first mush I connected to was run on a $30,000 HP workstation that had 32 megs of RAM. Like, I don't know, like, I don't know, like, 32. That was huge. Yeah, and it was, uh, yeah, I don't remember the processor. It was under 100 megahertz or something like that. But it was an expensive thing to have all these people running. It required a lot of power at that time to have them connect. And one of the problems with the early mushes was people would build so much

and they would keep the database of the objects built in RAM. And then they would build too much and they'd run out of memory and then they'd crash. Yeah, well, especially if you, I mean, yeah, there were a lot of ways because this could go wrong with a, because the scripting languages would be fairly flexible. So, you know, if you built a thing that when you did something, it made other things. Yeah, you could recursively crash. You could basically, you know, gray goo, your game world. Yeah, they had recursion limits and these function invocation limits to try to prevent you from overtaxing the system.

And they would make it so it costs real, I was about to say real world money. It costs in-world money. Yeah, you have a resource to make things to actually run your programs a little bit. So there is a limit to it and to build objects and things. But, you know, I have been BBSing every day since 1994. I mean, not BBSing. I still run a mush since 2000. It's almost 20 years old.

I can't believe it. Wow. That one I don't give out because it's sort of a private hangout. Sure, sure. But we, you know, me and I have friends that are for the last 20 years that we talk to each other like IRC kind of chat, even when we're not. I don't build much anymore. Do you guys ever going to move to Slack? No.

Slack is it. I'm totally joking. Yeah, but I mean, I actually thought about that. It's like, what if you built something like Slack with a... I mean, it supports bots and things. It's sort of like it in a way, but... But, yeah, yeah, I wonder if people have used Slack's functionality to create some sort of virtual game. You know, I just use it to, like, coordinate with Retronauts people and fan gamer, but...

I'm sure there's, like, bots that will do simple games, because people do bots for, like, you know, rolling dice and stuff to facilitate, like, online D&D sessions and stuff. So I'm sure people have done more complicated ones that can... Surely, yeah. Yeah, that can moderate their own sort of game. We're really considered that. So if you guys ever watched the AMC series, it wrapped up earlier this year, Hald and Catch Fire? No, but that's, I heard about it about it. That is really like the closest I've ever come to these mud experiences.

And I feel like just listening to you guys talk, it was clearly written by people who had authentic experiences. I mean, it's a little bit Hollywooded up. At some point, they basically create Habitat in 1985, which even literally, Lucasfilm games couldn't make happen in 1988, but like, you know, they're starting a business and it's, you know, kind of how it evolves over the course of the 80s and a lot of like muddying and mushing and these asynchronous online games, like that factors in really heavily. And I'm really curious to hear what you guys think about it if you ever get to see it. I haven't watched it, but the producers of that show asked me on two different occasions for

equipment or something. Wow. Okay. You know, like right when it was starting and then some other seasons later. But at first I gave them a tip about some of it. And then I think they were going to try to rent some from me. But they're like, oh, it turns out we don't need it. I spent like three months, like wrangling up PCs for their stuff for their last season or something.

People are slackers. Yeah, fell through. So anyway, so I haven't watched it, but I heard it's good, you know. Yeah. It came out up in another episode, didn't it too? because they talked about, like, TI and that... Yeah, yeah, I can't watch... I have this weird purity of memory thing

where I don't want to watch fictional portrayals of history. Since I write about this history all the time, I don't want any of that getting muddled in my head. Yeah, I can understand that, but I feel like more than any other show I've ever seen or movie or anything I've ever seen about that period of computer history, like they really, for the most part, get it right.

And there's been very little about it that I've just kind of said, man, this again. It's not like, you know, Sandra Bullock hanging out on a beach, getting on the internet in 1988 or like Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise goes on to Usenet and is like, max.com, got to find Max. See, you know that's totally fake, but it's worse when it's almost real because then my mind might be like when I'm trying to recall a memory. I'm like, hey, you remember that time they invented habitat in 1985? You know what I mean? So if you do this all day long for 12 years, you need to like some compartmentalization. So I don't read a lot of other people's history work because I don't want to, you know, pick up a bad fact and repeat it.

That happens a lot with people. So I want to originate my material. So I've got to try harder to get my bad facts into your world. Well, it just depends. Sometimes, you know, I can't. It just depends on, you know, I've spent a long time writing about online history and stuff in that early games. I have my little corner that I try to, you know, keep pure and everything else. Like if I'm going to like Sega or Nintendo stuff that I don't know about.

I'm happy reading about it from somebody else. Anyway, that's an aside. But the online gaming, I was going to talk about, we played modem-to-modem games on PCs, me and my friends that I met on BBSs. There were some where you could play checkers or something against each other or simple board games,

just dial one computer to another through the regular phone system, modem-to-modem. And then eventually Doom came out, which was a revelation because it had not only you could deathmatch, which a lot of people did, but we love to play through the game co-op. We'd play two people playing through the whole story together side by side,

and that was really awesome. I spent a lot of time doing that. Did you have to use Duingo to get online? No, we just, I just had my friend's phone number. Duongo was to help you hook up with people across the country through a different network, you know. They had their own kind of, I think they rented a... I didn't realize you could do that peer-to-pure with Doom.

Yeah, you could do direct connection, they call it. You could even do a serial cable between two machines if you wanted to. Yeah, I mean, I knew about the land functionality. I just didn't realize it worked online. But not even a land, just a serial cable. Oh, okay. Like when you wanted to fight against someone with Wichito Blade on PlayStation. Yeah, that was on the, it's cool on the PlayStation where they had the link cable.

You could play co-op Doom with the link cable, and on the Jaguar, you could do that. Some of Bunchies really old stuff had the early. connections. Like, didn't Minotar, Minotar had some weird connecting functionality, I don't know. I'll tell you. You know, I have two PVMs and

two PlayStation's. I need to get you guys over and we can like actually have a Wichito blade first person match. I would love that. Actually, my second PS1 is a PS1, like the little one. So that might not work, but I'm sure one of you guys. I don't know if as a link port, but I have two PlayStation's one or three.

I don't know. I might have one, but I'm not sure if it works. I have a PS1, the little white one, but I have some gray ones too. Man, that would be... I'm pretty sure I have the original PSX somewhere, but I'm not sure if it's working. All right.

It'd be fun. That's totally an aside, but that would be really cool. At my birthday party about 10 years ago, I got my brother to bring over his GameCube, and we linked up Mario Kart, you know, double dash. And we actually got, I think,

eight people playing, which was really fun. But although I was tiny on these... I had a second monitor that was small, so split the screen, but it was neat networking functionality. Yeah, you know, I remember when the original Halo came out. It was like a really big deal in the media. The press really loved it.

But I just remember reading it and thinking like, well, they're raving about the multiplayer, but who the hell can do that? Who can actually hook up, you know, eight TVs and Xboxes together in the same space? Like, if you work in the press, sure, you can do that in an office.

Like, that actually made me angry at the time. And I was like, I will never write for the games press. I'm going to be independent all my life. I would never work for a magazine. like that. The things we do for money. Yeah, I mean, people really did, you know, bring over 8x boxes and do that sort of thing.

But, I mean, we, like, back with, like, marathon, we would just take over the computer lab and, you know, just have, like, there was already a room with 30 computers in it, so we'll just go down there after hours. I played a lot of Marathon Infinity co-op and competitive when I was working on my university newspaper.

So you do have early online experience. Well, no, it wasn't online. It was within the land at the university. Well, it's close. It's networking. It was like to do two computers down from me. I know, but it's kind of networking. It's the same principle, but it's not.

If you could, like, throw something at the head of the person who's just shot you, like, no, that's not online. Well, it's the same principle. Online is empty friends of violent. We're using the same protocols, but you're just there instead of somewhere. Yeah, but it's still a different experience. I mean. Yeah, I know. Yeah.

My brother had, you know, he went to NC State and they had computer labs and they would play all these land games. games and stuff. Some of them were on Unix machines. They weren't even doing. But I was going to say, Doom 1 had four-person death match. You could do over a LAN over IPX network. And at a company I worked for at nighttime, the engineers would go there. They had a link together network.

They would play Doom together. So I think that happened to a lot of companies with Lans. It wasn't a lot of people bringing up there all computers together. Yeah. In college, I worked at a phone book company doing advertisements at night. And one of the guys that I knew from college got me that job there. So there were some nights where we would play stuff like Minotar and so forth on the company machines, which we should have been doing. But I guess it didn't really matter because we didn't get paid by the hour. We got paid by the ads. So, you know, it's all good. It was us shooting ourselves in the foot, basically. It wasn't taking away from company hours. By the way. And last year I wrote a slide show for PC MAG called seven early modem to modem computer games. Nice. Which is really neat.

I tried to track down the earliest. Oh, yeah, that chess looks familiar. The earliest games that actually advertise the fact that you could call someone with a modem and play them directly. One of the earliest is telechests for the Apple 2, 1984. Yeah. And then there's others like this version of Trek in 85. There's this crazy one, American Challenge Sailing Simulation.

On Minescape, you could actually... It's like vector graphics. Yeah, but it's insanely complicated. I haven't played this on my Tandy 1000 game. No, it's a sailing game. Oh, okay. Yacht racing comes up. Oh, a big one.

I'm suddenly getting his flashback to some sailing game on Apple 2. I'm not sure if it was that one, but man. It might be. It does say Apple 2 port. It may have been originated on that. But I played on the Tandy 1000. Please tell me that it had a soundtrack of like 8-bit yacht rock. Yeah.

It did. So I did. So I didn't play games online just because the games that I was interested in weren't really the kind of games you played online. Like I dabbled a little bit in land death matches. But even that's not really my thing. Like I like story-driven, solitary first-person shooters. And that's fine. But, you know, my online gaming experiences in the early 90s were all about, like, the communities.

You know, initially getting online and like, I would say early 94, getting on the web. to the very, very sad, early version of the web where it was just like a page of text and here's like a small 60 by 60 pixel inline image of like the cover of a King Crimson novel or something. A gray background. Yeah, like change it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like Netscape 1.0. But, you know, within that space, you started to see fan sites, you know, other people who were interested in the same things as me. You had to go to like link aggregators and find links to these things because there was no real search engine. Yeah.

Well, before Webrings, even, just like lists of pages. Yeah, who was just a directory of pages? Yeah, but, you know, I would find things like Final Fantasy Towns, which I know I've mentioned on the show before, but, like, yeah, Elisha and Abilene and, oh, God, there was the other one. There was a third one. Yeah, there was. But they were all just like, they were all just like, I feel like they were sort of inspired by Muds and Mushes. Yes. Like the idea of a website that was a place.

and um they you know this was before web forums and things like that were connected locations with like NPCs and stuff yeah like telling you things like here's an experience where you are you are in a town that was taken straight from final fantasy three but it's my town and everyone says their own thing yeah there's definitely a through line from the the much experience to those like hearing you guys talk about this I'm starting to make some connections that I didn't realize because there was this whole you know us net bBS thing that I was not fully aware of when I first got online like my first internet experience was the World Wide Web and

like again, I want to say early 1994 when I was just getting into college and my professors were like, there's this new thing World Wide Web, it's going to be big, you should check it out and I started working at the University newspaper doing ad design and we had one computer, it was like a

super beefy quadra and it was like super powerful at the time, not quite power PC but in better than a PC. The quadras were the top of all Yeah. And so that had like its own T1 line in a private office next to the computer lab. Nice. So I would just like sit in there after hours and be like, wow, internet. There's all kinds of stuff. So my online experiences initially for gaming weren't really gaming, but they were just kind of like absorbing information and seeing like, oh, there are other people who enjoy these things that I've started to like.

And I don't know anyone in real life who likes them. Yeah, but other people do, and I don't feel so alone anymore. The advent of the web there was when I had to change my online handle, because on the BBS days, I was Bahamint, you know, obviously from Final Fantasy, the big dragon that shows up all the time. And once I got on the web, that name was taken way too often because it was too popular. So that's when I switched to Kieran, which was a lesser known, something from Final Fantasy 6, which is where it originally came from. You didn't go with Starlet? I did not go with Starlet. But, yeah, I ended up, and it was in some of those Final Fantasy online communities.

Yeah, that's what I had the same experience. I think everybody did who got on the web, who had a niche hobby or something. But I had a website that had a list of resources about classic gaming. We called it at the time, not as before retro gaming was a term, and vintage computing and stuff. and it was on Yahoo's directory for Vintage Computing, like it was one of the sites, you know, one of the 100,000 sites it knew about or whatever.

You were lucky enough to be on Yahoo. Yeah, I was just on some. I had a fan page for an obscure character for Ronwell and a half, which was on the anime web turnpike. Let me, let me guess which character this was. Oh, was it Subasa? No, more obscure than that.

Wow. Gosinkugi? Akari. Which one is that? That was the girlfriend. Oh, the pig. The pig, yeah. Wow.

Well, she wasn't even in the English mock at that point for the automate. The English market. You were way ahead of the curve. Yeah, I don't hear of that. Damn, son. Yeah, so I would like to say a word about influences that you mentioned earlier, which is... It turns out when we think about the past like it is today, and we think about everyone using computers. But at the time, in the 80s and 90s, it was an extremely small group.

group of people. And so that group of people originally when, you know, first they all work together one company like deck or something and then they all split up into these Silicon Valley companies and they work together and they worked together and they spread. And all these ideas were shared

for mushes and muds and BBSs. Every single online game made was influenced by those things that came before because everyone played them and knew what they were. It was a much smaller world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like this episode is being recorded the same week that my interview with Robert Woodhead, Anamago, previously a surtec, one of the, you know, the programmer of wizardry, just went online. And he talked about the Plato system of the 70s.

And, you know, once I heard him talk about that and started reading about it, I was like, this is like the incubator of computing right there. So much came out of Plato. Plato is incredible, yeah. Yeah, I wish I could go back in time and just check out. what a Plato system. He said it had like a 512 by 512 plasma screen display. Like who did that in the 70s?

Yeah, it's insanely advanced. And so that was sort of isolated historically. Sure. Because it was in I.O.R. Minnesota. It was in Chicago. Champaign-Urbano. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the Silicon Valley guys didn't know Plato.

But if they had, boy, things would have advanced a lot faster. It was a pocket of innovation that's incredible. Right. But, I mean, it still had a big influence on people more on the East Coast Midwest. Yeah, the people who knew it, you know, they carried that with them. And on the West Coast, you had Xerox Park, which was, you know, just as much of an incubator of innovation and creative ideas. Yeah, they had the first networking, some of the first network games there in the Alto and stuff like that. I mean, that one's a lot better known just because it segues straight into the Silicon Valley Company.

So it always gets talked about it. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it depends on who writes the history and what history you read and what's what you hear. Here, I've found that myself just, you know, you can come along with a new story and it just sort of upsets someone's narrative of how history develops. Yeah, but I mean, it does seem like, you know, in the early days of computing, there were these little tide pools all sort of isolated. And then, you know, as computers began to spread, you know, it's like the tide came in and all of a sudden there's all this filtration and my, thank you. I like it. I'm a writer.

It's like Boston. I'm glad that I can occasionally come up with a good metaphor. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, the Tide pool works. Tide came in. So I'd like to talk about console gaming. First, online console gaming. Yeah.

But online console gaming. Oh, they were. Yes. There were early. So you're talking about Nintendo's stock network, stock market system. I have one of those FAMICOM online systems downstairs. Yeah, always one one. Which I got specifically because it has a really good controller, which I think it's supposed to be supported by the analog NT.

The button. Yeah. It has like a. number pad on it. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Like, I have no use for the online component of it, but the number pad, you know, awesome. Like, I think the analog and T is supposed to be supporting that for things like Intellivision and Clecovision.

Do you type in numbers in Super Mario Brothers? Do you get to go do it? No, you don't. I got 99 live. You pressed a crown button. It's a secret. So, there were early online gaming experiments in the 80s with consoles with

the television had like a cable modem. That's crazy. There was some dial-up modems, you know. There's the Sega channel 94. A download service for Intellivision. Yeah, there's GameLine for the 2,600 or something. I don't know if they did head-to-head gaming was, I'm sure there was some precursor and I've probably already written about it.

But the first, you know, I'm telling you, there's so much stuff. I can't remember everything. I forgot more about video games than you even know. And you ever knew. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just asked, well, I was Googling that seven head-to-head modem games. I just typed in Benj Edwards modem, and that was a mistake because it was too much stuff. Anyway, so, uh, uh, ex-band. That's what I'm getting to.

It was my first. I heard of that one. Yeah. In, uh, I don't know, 94, 95, something around there, 96 even. Okay, but for Super NES or Genesis? Super NES. But I played killer instinct against somebody. Huh. And something else. But it, it wasn't that great of an experience because they kicked my ass quickly. And it cost money for the service and you couldn't play very many games on it. How was the lag on it? It wasn't that bad. Yeah. But it was a revelation because...

It just seems like a fighting game. Like, you need some pretty quick response in order to not lose sync on something like a fighting game. Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of surprised it was good enough for that. They did. I think Mortal Kombat 2 was supported or something. But it was just a neat. It was the first really mainstream push at putting a modem on a console.

There was some... There was something earlier that I did in a retrospect. game that was almost like teleplay modems, baton teleplay. They wanted to do that for the NES and Genesis earlier, but it never came out. Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that happened in Japan. Like I was, I mentioned, there was, well, on Famicom, you had the, I don't know exactly what it was, but it was like that, that device I have, which has no value now. But you could get online and check your stocks and things like that. And then, yeah, the Satellaview came out. And that was a download service that predates X-Band.

But it also had like some real-time components. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could download games like a different game each month and save it on your flash card. But there were also broadcast games. I know the most famous one is Zelda. Right. And there were three or four Zelda games, like chapters. It was like installments.

Yeah. And like they only broadcast, I think, twice each. And for like one hour. there would be like a live navigator actually giving out instructions calling out instructions live through the network and you would play the game

and follow their instructions and try to like race other players. Kind of like almost like a precursor to four swords but you know in a different sense. And they had a real time element with a clock too. Yeah I've heard about people talking this as like you know one of the most difficult sort of retro games to preserve

because you have to both have the code for this game that was downloaded and then the Seekers of, like, some of the broadcasts have been captured the HHS, but not all of them. Yeah, but. So, yeah, that is, like, that's kind of like next level online or, you know, game preservation. Yeah. That's a, it was only one way, though. It wasn't a two-way system.

Right. No, but, you know, the Satellovue did have leaderboards and things like that. And, you know, so. Yeah, so you can send back scores. Yeah, I've got like, um, probably had a, if there's a way to send back scores, it probably did it through a phone with a modem or something. Yeah, yeah. No, you can't do a uplink satellite thing from your house.

I mean, it might have been a different setup in Japan. I don't know exactly. But I've got the game Samigami, or same game, if you prefer. Yeah, Samajami. And that has, like, interchangeable cartridges that you can plug into the actual cartridge to change out your character maps. But it also had Satellaview support, and you could upload your scores to a leaderboard. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, you know, that's just one of the neatest little side.

side views there. That's one of the things where we talked about I don't know I feel like I talked to Frank Sefaldi about this where we were talking

about how if you know, this is one of my themes I wrote an article about this long time ago if people hadn't illicitly preserved these things

they would be lost now. Right, absolutely. So we depend on piracy. I wrote an article called Why History Need Software Piracy in 2012 that was really big and it was talking about how, you know,

it turns out these people backing up these games to copy them for selfish reasons actually did everyone a huge service by preserving them too and categorizing them and also later raising interest in them again. And so, yeah, Satelovie is one of those things that would definitely been lost completely by now without elicit backups and copies. And, you know, the corporations, the copyright holders are happy to let these things vanish because they don't have any monetization value now.

Like you can't make money off a Sateloview broadcast now, so who cares? Nintendo doesn't care. All they care about is don't steal our copy of Zelda. But they don't care about making that Zelda experience available to people now, which is a shame. It's all about normalizing video games as cultural experiences that are on the level of movies and TVs and operas and whatever. That's what I've had to do from the beginning. I've been preaching this where it's accepted now. 10 years ago it wasn't so much.

I got a lot of people like, they're just games. Nobody cares, but these are the experiences of a whole generation. It becomes a seed, one of the ingredients in the recipe of the person that makes you who you are. I mean, if you look at classic rock bands, there are bands that have just made hundreds of albums available of concert recordings. You know, like they took the soundboard from their concert in Chicago in March 1976, and you can listen to that soundboard recording. And then they have one, you know, they've. released an album from a month later in Duluth and you can listen to that one

and they're like the same set list but there are differences and so you know everyone from King Crimson to Pearl Jam to the of course the Grateful Dead like you know they have all these albums available that you know like the really hardcore fans can listen

to pretty much every possible concert recording of the band that they love so you know like the idea of obsessing over you know preserving these experiences, this artistry is not something that video game fanatics

invented, and I don't think video game fans are wrong to want to be able to enjoy that sort of experience. But, you know, game companies don't, they haven't decided to capitalize on these forgotten experiences the way bands have.

Yeah, there needs to be a, like a period after which you have a blanket. What's that term for like you forgive everyone at the same time? Amnesty, yeah. Copyright shouldn't last 90 years for one thing. It should last like 20 years. But I think there should be a cultural amnesty on copyright for cultural reasons because I think that when a person consumes media, it becomes, and once you publish it, it becomes like a part of your culture that can't be extricated from it without doing damage, like a gear and a machine. That's the way I would put it. I feel like it belongs to everyone in a certain way. I feel like the original Super Mario Brothers should be open, you know, like open. it should be it should be public domain speaking of which on the was it the 20th or 30th of super

mary brothers one i was about to write that they should release the source code for or something i asked john carmac about it because i was going to do an article or something he's like well somebody already disassembled the whole thing and you know it's pretty much open source already it's not a lot to see yeah but that's an exception things have been slowly being getting better i mean it's still it's all about what the companies think they can actually get money from but at least at least the companies are starting to think about now things that can be re-released in other formats. Yeah, but I mean, I have...

As opposed to the, you know, there was an era where, you know, a company would finish with a game and just, like, throw it all out. There's whole games where all the source code, all the design docs were just, you know, tossed out in an office move because no one cared. I own a Blu-ray, a Blade Runner, that has five different versions of the movie

available for you to watch. There's like the crappy Harrison Ford narration version. There's like the Ridley Scott, this is my true, pure vision version. There's like three other versions on there. More game re-releases need to have that. And M2 does that to a degree. Yeah.

Like, you know, their Sega ages stuff, they've been pretty good about preserving like, well, here's the American version. Here's the Japanese version. Here's like a tweaked version of Sonic the Hedgehog where you have a spin dash. Like that never existed, but it's cool. But no one else does it. No one else. I mean, it's amazing to everyone that Nintendo released Skyskipper. Just like SkySkipper exists.

Wow. like Nintendo acknowledged it. Donkey Kong came out with all three international versions on it. Like, that's crazy. Yeah, every once in a lot. And it shouldn't be crazy. It should be, like, that should be the norm. That should be the accepted.

We got way off topic here. What the hell happened? We went into the preservation podcast. Where do we go? What, what? BBS is. Yeah, well, we were talking about console gaming and then Satellaview. And then I think we have to mention the dream cast.

Well, okay, but you guys, you guys are making a liar of me. I said this wouldn't be an hour long and we're 50 minutes now. Or the Sagan. But this whole genre is stuff that's hard. Early online stuff is hard to preserve. It's hard to replicate. I agree. Because it was very much of the time.

And, you know, it's all old hardware. I mean, how do you preserve the experience of a BBS with the people who are using BBSs in 1985? And the like mucks that I spent an entire summer on, you know, that was a whole world. It's gone. You know, there's no way to get that back. No one has a copy of that. Where's Elusia? Yeah.

It's gone. Is it not in the way back machine? I don't think, I don't know. Probably not. I think it predates the wayback machine. It probably does predate the way back machine. like 1994 or 95. I have an answer for your question.

Do it, which is that I've, you know, I spent a lot of time talking about this and talking to other people with similar ideas like Henry Lowood of Stanford and J.P. Dyson of the Strong and Jason Scott and Franks LaFaldi and all these names. We're all buddies. We all buddies. Yep. We're all buddies.

No, but I mean, we are actually all about us. But to the point. No, the point is, is that I was going to do an article about this years ago and I was asking all these people same thing, which is how do you preserve these experiences that are ephemeral? And I came to the conclusion that it's like, how do you preserve the world? How do you preserve your life? You know, you can't go back to see exactly how life was in the 30s. That's how complicated a world of Warcraft server is with all the culture and all the people on it at that time. The best thing you can do is take pictures and video caps, you know,

screenshots. And so the strong, not because of me, they started their own system of recording people playing these games and the experiences around them, which is a really neat idea. And I think maybe a Stanford who is doing that too. But, you know, I think that that's going to be the solution on these complicated multiplayer things. It's not just preserving Super Mario Brothers, which you can play over and ever again since they're becoming multiplayer experiences intrinsically and they're being updated in real time. Like, Fortnite keeps getting updates. Minecraft was like that.

Yeah, I mean, Fortnite already. Like, it's only been around for about, you know, a year or so. And already, like, the sky is broken and there's, like, weird stuff happening. And it's a different world. It's like a living world that keeps changing, you know. It makes me think there's a lot of stuff potentially out there to be in mind because at a certain point, a lot of these experiences started keeping logs and things. So, like, I'm pretty sure, you know, in a subholder of a subholder of an old hard drive archive,

on my hard drive, I have the logs from like the myth tournaments I ran that you could theoretically with a working version of myth playback, including like this, I'm pretty sure people's comments are in there and like the whole way, the way game win is on there. And so these things are out there somewhere. I love Twitch because you can see the

playback of the chat while there. If you watch a playback of the thing, that's so cool. But you know, on the other hand, you know, we were talking earlier about about the Satellaview and, you know, talking about how Nintendo doesn't care about preserving that experience because it's, you know, Not financially viable.

Yeah, who cares about that one broadcast. And, you know, there is a, I think, especially in Japanese culture, the philosophy that the idea that, you know, something is precious because it disappears. The ephemeral. The ephemeral vanishes. And that's why you should, you should, you know, cherish it because you can only have that experience once, you know, a river is only the same river once. Yeah, there are people like, I know Jason Scott has written violently against that idea,

like the idea of that forgetting is good and that deleting things is good. He wants to save everything. Although in my, and I generally, I agree that we should collect everything we can now to let historians of the future make sense of what happened. Although just personally, as I'm getting older and I'm sorting through trinkets and stuff I saved from when I was a kid, like just because I moved,

I realized that it is some of the stuff I've lost that's the most special. It's not what it's like my first car. that anymore. But if I still had it, it'd be just a damn old rusted car in the backyard. It wouldn't be that experience that I remembered, you know? Yeah. Well, I, you know, I wish... From a personal standpoint, forgetting is good sometimes, or not forgetting, losing

and, you know, losing things. Having it just as memories. I, you know, I... Same thing you said about Japanese stuff. I'm kind of torn, because as a historian, you know, someone who works in video game history, I want to make a record of this, all of this, and keep it alive, and

you know, make it accessible and, and, and available to future generations. Like, that's what I'm doing with the Game Boy books and NES books that I publish. But at the same time, like, I do feel, you know, like the experiences are fleeting. You know, the things that I love that make Super Nintendo so precious to me, a lot of it has to do with who I was at the time and the impact of that technology in my life. Like, at the time, I looked at, you know, I played Super NES games and I was like blown away by the sound and the graphics. And now I look at them and it's just, you know, like how many games have we played with that level of technology, you know?

No matter how many times I play Act Razor, I'm never going to have the Act Razor experience that the first time. I'm never going to have another moment where I'm playing Final Fantasy 4 and I hear the theme of the dungeons and I'm like, how is my computer? How is my game system doing that? I've got to turn this up and just like stand here and listen to it. What is happening? I mean, no. Things have moved on and I moved on and that's okay. the new generations either, how powerful

that was. Right. It's just not possible. I've tried, you know, for years to describe how Super Mario Brothers won was the greatest thing that ever happened. But now it's just so, oh, yeah, it's just another platform. All I can do is, you know, explain the context to it and let people understand.

Like, you know, once upon a time we were a little cave people and you know, having 32 levels with hidden coins, that was crazy. Yeah. And the secret. but yeah so that's just there's a there's a wave in every generation of people come up in popular media who capitalize on nostalgia like the people who grew up in the 50s and the 80s and

stuff they started making movies about the 50s and stuff and there's like ready player one is tailor made for people our age who grew up in the 80s with all those experiences I don't think it'll be as powerful in this it won't be experienced the same way as someone who grew up in a different generation because it doesn't mean the same thing to them. Yeah, I mean, I think Stranger Things is probably a better example of something that's like, the 80s. This podcast is now about being old.

I mean, this podcast is always about being old. But we are getting old as we talk here. This was supposed to be like a half hour podcast. It's now almost an hour. We hit some early gaming stuff. I mean, I do go. This was, I feel like a really good organic discussion and I'd like

to have more discussions like this on the show. So it's great. Hopefully everyone else listening agrees, but, yeah, instead of, you know, putting a neat bow on things, let's kind of leave it open-ended so we can reconvene at some point. Yeah, I'd like to talk about Dreamcast online gaming, which was the first time. I mean, we've got to talk about Sega Swirl. Come on. Yeah. First time they took it seriously. Right. So we'll talk about that sometime. Okay.

I feel like for now we've gone way over the length, just like we always do with Retronauts micro. Oh, good God. What the hell is wrong with us? But yeah, thanks. I really enjoyed this episode because for the most part, I was like a passive observer. I don't get to have that experience very often. So thank you for letting me experience retronauts the way the rest of the world does. People who don't research, you know, for several hours and then lead a podcast. It was great. But yeah, like hearing about all these experiences that I never got to enjoy and have only experienced, I said, you know, like I said, second, third hand through things like halt and catch fire. It's just always interesting to hear about So thank you guys for sharing your experience You want to tell us where we can find you Talking about BBSs or whatever online? I don't know I'm all over the place Just Google modems or BBSs and my name will pop up

Probably I'm actually not joking I'm Ben Jadwards I run vintagecom You can find me also on Twitter at Benj Edwards And Ben I'm Ben Elgin I'm on Twitter as

K-I-R-I-N. I also have a retro gaming blog, which has been, or not retro gaming, but retro in general blog, which has been sadly neglected this year, but I'll get back to. It's at Kieran's retrocloset.tumbler.com, only one N in that, Kieran. There's definitely some old, old bungee game stuff up there at any rate. I don't know if there's any BBS stuff up there, but we'll see. Anyway, thanks again, guys, for joining things everyone up there, for listening, and we'll talk some more about this stuff, this free-form rambling video game, history, computer experience, whatever the hell this was. I enjoyed it.

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Earn 4% on dining and 4% on entertainment. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Capital One Bank, USANA. This week and Retronauts, enjoy my Kirby Timeline Theory. We get letters and written letters in the mail. We're going to read them to you now. Hi, everyone, just kidding. I don't have a Kirby timeline theory, and you're not going to enjoy it even if I did.

So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to have a little episode where we catch up with listener mail because there's a bunch that's come in that I haven't necessarily been able to include in all my episodes. And for this exciting ride through your brains, I have dragged along. Hi, it's Bob Mackie. I'm known best for my beta hyped up arrogance. I don't know what that means, but someone sent me that comment. If you ever see, you ever had a beta fish, they are like so arrogant and hyped up. I think they're saying I'm a beta male. They kill each other.

I've never seen a hyped beta fish. Did you put two beta fish together? Like two male beta fish together? They're called fighting fish for a reason. Oh, that's hilarious. I think they mean it. Actually, it's like brutal and horrible. I think they're saying I'm a beta male.

Oh, okay. But I'm not a soy boy. I drink almond milk. Obesolete. VHS is obsolete. I am a Blu-ray male. I'm a Divix male. Oh, no.

You self-struct. That's obvious. Sorry, who's this other person in here? Hi, I'm Shivam, and I'm actually just a male order. A mail order? Yeah, a mail ordered gamer.

A mail orderly. Yeah, so anyway, thank you everyone for all the letters that you submit for our solicitations for listener mail. You are listeners, not readers. I'm sorry that I don't always manage to squeeze these into episode recording sessions, but

sometimes the conversation's just so good and so voluminous that we don't have time, but that doesn't mean we've forgotten about you. So there are a Quite a few games that we're going to run through in the next half hour or so. Sweaketed 1 and 2, Final Fantasy 6, Mega Man X, those last two from months back. And thank you for those of you who resubmitted your comments. There's a couple of other things.

Let's see. I don't know. We'll figure it out when we get there. But let's just jump straight in. So with Swiquetan 1 and 2, Saving Princess, says, The love I have for Swiquid and 1 and 2 is only matched by the disappointment I had in Swikidon 3. All the spray-based charm, the character designed the music, everything, seemed to be completely lost in the rest of the series.

One and two felt more like two halves of a whole in the same way a New Hope and the Force Awakens do. Okay, that's not the comparison I would make there. The New Hope and Force Awakens feels more like a copy of... Yeah, like the Force Awakens and Last Jedi, those feel like two parts of a whole. Yeah. I don't know so much about... Okay. But at least we understand where you're coming from, though.

at least the spirit is there. It's a well-intended place of the heart. However, I mean, is there more to that or? Just go for it. I mean, however, I do kind of disagree with the premise because Sugo 1 and 2 are phenomenal obviously, but Succo 3 gets a short trip from a lot of people because it's poop. Because the look changed so dramatically, but the soundtrack was phenomenal. The Grasslands theme is amazing.

It's a good soundtrack. There's a lot of really good songs. The thing about, the thing about a jinky, game with a great soundtrack is that you can get a different disc that has just the soundtrack and enjoy that without the Jake. But here's the thing, though, the thing about Ticket and 3 that really resonated that makes it really good even when you go back to it now is that like the way that the stories were told with the three different viewpoints kind of going over the same thing

to give you a different taste of like the colonial view versus the indigenous view. Roshaman, got to catch them all. It's it. I mean, it really is actually cool. And Hugo being one of the first brown characters I've seen in a JRP. That's true. Fair enough. I mean, it was, for me, it's an Indian dude.

It resonated a lot. I mean, I'm never going to say that it's as good as one and two, but it's definitely, it's like Chrono Cross. It's better than you think it is. But the name hurts it a lot. Well, you are, you are like unique in that. I would play it. I mean, I'm never going to play it again, three. But if you're going to play it, I would use an emulator with a frame skip button.

Because what I remember most about the game is just like, they're so. so many loading screens. Yeah. It's of its time. That's my big problem. Quiet of music says, I love the idea of being able to import your save file from the first game into the second one and have it actually impact

certain things throughout the game. Like a lot of things in the North American release of Sweenigan, too. It was a little buggy. Yeah, we talked about that in the episode that's a Sviken episode. You can hear more about that. Peter Rosevic says, Svikenin 1 showed me that turn-based fights can be dynamic in execution.

I loved it. Great game is much better than the 3D sequels. 2D artwork does not have problems with textures and low-poly models. Yeah. Nathaniel Everett-Crocker says, The Swigdian games do something wonderful that not a lot of other game series do successfully,

and that's tell epic-scale stories that are nevertheless contained within a small portion of a much larger world that is only gestured at. Contrast this with, say, Final Fantasy, which almost always has a world map that is completely traversable by the climax of the game. I actually agree with that. That's one of my favorite parts about the Sikodan series.

Like when I was in college, I had the maps of the games on my wall and kind of linked up in a way to show how the globe might look. And the fact that Tsukodan, in like those games, you meet characters who imply that they're from a different section of the world. And in like the sequel, you go to that section of the world. And in later games, you go to another section. And it feels like, oh, we're doing these huge epic scale battles, but they're actually just a tiny corner of this continually growing world. and that was, I think, one of the real peaks of that series. It reminds me of the evil-list games where you're not seeing the entire world, you're only seeing part of it at a time.

Exactly. Ray John says this about Swigod and Two's Joey. A lot of people don't like the character or buy into his character development, but I think the game does a wonderful job justifying them. Just by talking to NPCs, you get a feel for the long-held animosity between the game's two factions, an animosity that won't just end because a piece is made. So I had real sympathy for the decision Joey made to continue the conflict after Luca Blight's death.

Speaking of Luca, I was amazed how perfectly Joey serves as a foil for both the cartoonishly evil Luca Blight and the remarkably virtuous protagonist. The first half of the game is incredibly cut and dry morally, lulling a player into a false sense of security before cold, hard reality sets in with Joey's heel turn. I could not agree more.

Rowan Indus Carmichael says, Sweak it in is a series I want to love, but every time I play through the original, I just feel so unenthused. I hope listening to you guys will give me a greater appreciation for the series. That's your clarion call. Oh, my God.

Sligan N1 is one of just like, it is one of my comfort food game. It is like, so I wish I knew what it was that didn't drag you because the thing is when you're playing this game, you start out as just this young man who is this hero who's lost in this world, your father is like working for the evil empire, but then you're just building up and exploring this world, discovering these new things, talking to these people, you're discovering the length and depth of this conflict. How does it not drag you in? How do you not care about these people by the end of it?

I can kind of see this. I feel like the beginning hours of the game, the first five or six hours, they're kind of visually repetitive. So you're waiting. Once you get the castle and you can start adding people to it, I think it really does hook you by then. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm just trained by RPGs by that point to just expect like, oh, it's going to be kind of generic featureless. But, man, that story hooks you. All right.

Jeremy, not me, says, as much as I love Sweakidan, I was beyond excited for the release of Sweakinen 2, which improved upon the original in nearly every way possible, and to this day remains my favorite game of all time. Amen. Not sure I have words adequately to explain, describe my love for the sequel, but I'm sure by now others have done a fine job as its reputation is well earned.

I mean, yeah, Sikodin 2, best game of all time. I will stand on that. Scott Scossi says, I love the Swikidon series, especially the second game. The first game is a delight, but a little insubstantial. I would compare those two games to Mega Man 1 and 2 and how the first game was good, but the sequel managed to improve on it

in just about every way. I would rank it up there in the best of its genre. And an astounding stroke of luck I got the game in 2002 or so after stumbling on it in a thrift store and it paid about $5 for it. That might be the best money I've ever spent.

Man, by then the game would have been like, it was costing over $100 bucks on eBay back then. Yeah, by 2000 it was already... I mean, it was rare. It was hard to get. 120, yeah. Dr. Agon says,

I am from South Africa, and back in the 90s, we had literally no access to any games that weren't sports games. I made an email pen pal from Thailand and the guy sent me about 40 games I'd never heard of, most of them Japanese. Nice.

But the three that stood out for me were Wild Arms, Vandal Hearts, and Swikodon, all of which I had never heard of. I'd somehow, through vague relatives, possessed an Intellivision, a master system in the Famicom by that time, but it never delved into to experience the JRP genre.

Swikido one was my first and still one of the best. I still get goosebumps when I hear the Island Fortress theme song. It was one of the first times that I dealt with permanent virtual death as part of a narrative. I would love everything about Sweak it in until the day I die. You know, people always say like, oh, man, losing that girl in Final 57 totally made me cry. I'm like, no, dude, Gremio, that'll make you cry. I don't know.

Like I said, Grimio is a little, like, his death is a little goofy. Yeah, yeah. I'm going blind because of the sports. And, I mean, when you're walking through that door and you see this weird looking room that doesn't look like any other room in the building, you're like... Yeah, it's like in Mass Effect 2 when you walk into a room and it's a big, open box and there's a lot of, like, crates on the ground. You're like, there's going to be a shootout here.

I'm going to guess something is going to happen. Ted Buffa says, just over a year ago, I had major surgery on my ankle. Knowing that I was going to be laid up for the better part of three months, I decided to catch up on some classic RPGs that I had missed. Among these were the first two squeakening games. Recovery was considerably more intense than I could have expected and had to keep my leg in its cast, elevated it at all times. I spent the first couple of weeks lying on the ground, foot in the air.

I kept a spreadsheet of all 108 stars of destiny, worked my way through both games. I discovered a treasure of wonderful matched-together ideas and a healthy dose of town building. These two games are the perfect distraction from an otherwise rough patch in my life. Kevin Bunch says, after a friend let me

as copy in high school, circa 1998, Swicken became the first RPG I became really obsessed with after playing earthbound years prior. I love the story of intrigue, the battle system, the way your castle grew, and the secret little tricks needed to finish the game with them all 108 stars. Yep. It's like, if you step on these three plants in this one city, you won't get the guy

because he's a gardener and he's mad that you crushed his plants. Wait, is that really a thing? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good one at the very end. I knew from the beginning I wanted all the stars, so I used the fact to make sure I didn't destroy my chances. That's the only reason I used to fact.

I didn't realize that. Wow. Oh, yeah. No, there were a lot of this, there were a lot of just like, oh, I triggered something really dumb and now I can't get this guy. But it's so cool. I just love it. Brian Reynolds says

Right now the prevailing opinion seems to be that the original Swigodin is okay, but really just something to blow through as quickly as possible in order to get to the real masterpiece. I wouldn't say that the original is better than the sequel or anything like that, but I do think the original Swiquetan is a great game in its own right. One moment near the end of the original Swigodon

always stuck out to me. After kicking the Scarlet Moon Empire's butt across the land and claiming all its top generals for your own, you'd finally make it back to the capital of Gregminster, your hometown for the final battle. And the capital, which started out as a vibrant city full of peaceful memories for your main character is now completely empty, abandoned by all

his people, and even the color palette has been toned down from green and gold to brown and gray. Yeah. Even in the music, even more affecting as the music, where the same bright and happy town theme music you hear in the beginning of the game is still present, but softer, slower, and always threatened to be drowned out by the whooshing wind blowing through the deserted city.

Yeah, that always totally resonated with me. So first game I can remember that made me feel like I was the hero and made all the right choices, but even if those choices were still right, they had negative consequences as well. Yeah, I mean, going back to Greg Minster at the end, which is cut off from the beginning of the game, after you leave that place with all the generals, when you finally make it

back to your home, you're like, oh, my God, what is this war done to this place? And it's really just an affecting moment. From Luke Underwood, he actually has a point that he bolded and underlined in his letter that underscores something that I said in this week at an episode. The attack animations, coupled with the extra crunchy sound effects when bashing or slicing an enemy gave the turn-based combat a much more kinetic feel than any JRP I had played up to that point.

That is absolutely correct. Yes, sir. Was that 2009's Jeremy Parrish who said that? Yes, that was me from the past. What? Lou Grant says, no matter how many times I played Suket and one or two, I played with the same team, Flick, Victor, Alan,

Grinsill, a hero, and a dealer's choice character. I wonder what that means. Dealer's choice means just whatever he's the star enforcer on. I see. I intentionally cripple myself because Flick, Victor, and the night characters are all short range, which means one of them is in the back row and useless unless they're good with magic.

I did this because I always beat the game with the fancy lad attack, and I couldn't bear to separate Flick and Victor. And anyway, that's when I realized I was gay. What a way to end to the comment. Come on. I mean, like I said, I discovered Yawai because of Sikkim, N, when licking up that art for this game. Thank you. All right, so let's jump into the Mega Man X mailbag.

Oh, wow. It happened a long time ago. It's like in, uh, who was president at this time. We don't have a president anymore. Um, from Louis Guillermo Jimenez Gomez. I've always loved Mega Man X since playing it on Super Nias, but I don't think it really hit me how sophisticated and minutely designed it is until years later when finishing it on GameCube, especially after playing Mega Man 2 and 3 and becoming aware of how X builds on the strengths of its predecessors

while introducing new elements that series would take in different directions in the future. David Dallarimple says Mega Man X is one of my ultimate comfort food games which I can play for an hour or two of stress-free action delight. Its boss patterns are easy to reliably follow. The controls are tight and responsive

and the game is forgiving in a way that Mega Man games typically aren't. Yeah, I think it wasn't until my early 20s maybe at the earliest that I realized just how sophisticated and great Mega Man X's. I just thought of it before like, oh, it's a better looking Mega Man. But as I said on that episode, I think I think it is the best Mega Man game. I agree. The thing that always got me about X was the fact that when I first saw I am running uphill, it blew my mind.

I was just like, Mega Man can run uphill. There are diagonals. Jamie Williams says Mega Man X was the perfect evolution of the NES Mega Man series. The general gameplay formula was familiar, but the art of mechanics were new enough to set it apart from the classic universe and justify another series. Finding all the upgrades, heart tanks, and the Hadoken, occupied many hours of my time. For some reason, I got the idea to hold my breath during the underwater portions of launch Octopus's stage. I do not encourage this.

Yeah, it seems like a really good way to hurt yourself. Alfonso Jose Rivera Rojas says, Mega Man X was the game that made me fall in love with the Mega Man X series and the whole Mega Man franchise. While I had read previews of the game in a local video game magazine, it wasn't until I played the game that I realized how amazing it is. I still remember going to a friend's house when I was 10 years old, about a year after the game was released, and seeing my friend blazing through the game. I was instantly hooked with its type mechanics, clever level design,

and superb and badass character designs. Rijon Lagos says Mega Man X is probably my favorite video game of all time. I could wax at length on how amazing the level design and art is, but to keep this brief, I'll just mention something that you seem to have omitted in the podcast. It impressed me how bosses would sometimes have a secondary weakness to export, point. When launch octopus, while launch Octopus may take more damage from the rolling shield sub weapon, if you hit him with the boomerang cutters, his arms fall off, rendering him

nearly defenseless. It's a minor thing, but as a veteran from the N.A.S. Mega-Man games has moved my mind, opening a whole world of opportunities that the devs actually did very little with in the long run. But it is a good way to get replay value out of the game. I agree. I feel like all those little touches we talked about are not in these sequels. They're missing, like how certain stages will change and these little.

those little touches. Yeah, I feel like Mega Man X, they really just went out of their way to do all these amazing things. And then in the later ones, they're like, you know, let's just stick to the ones we need and not the ones that nobody's ever going to see.

Yeah. Ryan Feuerheim says, Mega Man X, or Mega Man is my favorite game series of all time and Super NES X games are included. I have a tattoo of X doing the classic Mega Man power slide. Wait a minute. He doesn't do that. He dashes.

Oh, oh, God. We shouldn't tell this person this. As the focal point of my video game sleeve, and my fiance and I took Mega Man theme Save the Date photos for upcoming wedding. I was extended to get a Super Nies classic and Mega Man X was the first game I played after listening to the brilliant retronauts episode

over X. Oh, Shucks. I went back and challenged myself by doing a Buster-only run. I was successful, but less so when I tried beating the game without any power-ups. I got to say, I'm not a fan of all these people who are like Buster-only purists. Like, the game gives you sub-weapons. They're cool. Use them and don't feel bad about using it.

Buster only is good for Mega-Man 4. I have a tattoo of Mario holding his famous sword. So, don't feel bad. Da-na-na-na-na-na. The Excalibur? Yeah. Sure. Jose Daniels says, Mega Man X is, to me, the greatest game ever made.

There's a lot of people saying this. They're copying me. If people haven't played Zika then, obviously. It wasn't my first Mega Man guy. Okay, Sheevam. Are you peasing out now? Is that it? We talked about Sukin and you're done. Don't drop our mics on the floor.

They're very expensive. getting very miffed by all these people who just don't understand the true greatest games of all time. I'm just saying. They will on their deathbed. It was sweet. So here's my favorite part of Jose's letter. I remember fighting for dear life against vile,

having no idea the fight was scripted. I wonder why the dash button did nothing, only to then find the Dr. Light capsule that gave me the game-changing dash ability. It's a learning experience. And finally, whoa. Oh, my goodness. Somebody said their senior thesis, man.

Paul van der Weijan says everything. Wow. That's our entire podcast transcript right there. Thank you for typing all that up. Boy, let me trim this down. Yeah, so Mega Man X is just such a cool game. And like putting the Hadukan in there was such a cool idea. And I just wish I was better at Mega Man games.

Yeah, okay. So here's a highlight. I finally got my hands on the game. My 13-year-old mind was blown away. From the highway level, with its battle-damaged car fleeing the scene and giant B-copters, X's ability to dash to the screen-filling terror that is Sigma's Final Four, X-1 was so far beyond what I could have imagined it, left a lasting impression. Up to this day, I play the game at least once a year from start to finish, hooking up my old Super Nias to the TV. Even now I'm still struck by how right this game feels, and just how much attention was given to detail. Like how the armored armadillo boss

loses a shell after being hit by the electric spark or the way levels are affected after beating certain bosses. Not to mention the music. It truly feels like a labor of love. Was this on the S&ES classic? It is, yeah. Okay, I should go home and play that.

Okay, so let's move on to Final Fantasy 6, which we also talked about a billion years ago. Actually, Sheepam, you weren't on that episode. No, I was on the 5-5 episode. Do you have thoughts about Final Fantasy 6? It's a good game. Well done. Okay, great. I think everyone agrees.

So this is from Josh Garvey. It's also very lengthy. Okay, let's go with the final dungeon was a joy. That fight with Kefka was a sight to behold. I'm curious what everyone's strategy for the final dungeon was. My first time through I used Mog with the Mughal charm to turn off random encounters for one group, which kind of bit me in the butt when under-leveled Mogamaro, Gog, and Gao, and Gao tried to use, take on one of the statues. I think this also started my long-standing enjoyment of breaking games wide open, which Final Fantasy 6 is kind of notorious for.

the offering in Genji glove, the gem box and a economizer, making fun use of the merit badge. It was a fun sandbox to experiment it. What does the merit badge do? Oh, I can look it up actually. But I will say that I didn't use the Mughal charm on any place but

the Tower of Mages or whatever just because it was such a pain in the ass and it was a easy way to cheat. I think that that was just installed in the game in case you wanted to get past that one area and get Strego. Yep. Maybe Stregor I don't know. I just, I use that to get to the, that's where you get the gem box or whatever?

I believe so, yeah. Okay. I also kind of love the Ted Woolseyisms, slid his mama's throat for a nickel, son of a submariner, do I look like a waiter? The limitations are clear, but there was so much charm. So the merit badge allows the wearer to equip almost any piece of equipment.

So that's a very, very good relic. So another long one from Scott Schneider. Final Fantasy 6 is the first game I played where I felt I had the freedom to do things. Part of this is because I'm mostly a console gamer. I believe PC RPGs at the time had way more freedom. But the World of Ruined in Final Fantasy 6, yeah. We, I don't know when this episode is going up,

but we just recorded some conversations on Ultima and Bard's Tale and got very much into how long it took for console RPGs to catch up to the openness of PCRPGs. The World of Ruin in Final Fantasy 6 was the first time I'd experienced a, I can go do what I want in a game. It's almost but not quite a 16 version of, a 16-bit version of Open World.

I distinctly remember loading up my saved game in World of Ruin at a friend's house and feeling a sense of place, unlike most other games. I could load up my save, explore, and accomplish things without an explicit goal in mind. Then I quickly realized, wow, Final Fantasy 6 is one of my favorite games ever. Aaron Middleton says, I noticed you guys didn't say much about the relic system. It's completely understandable given how much there is to say about Final Fantasy 6, but I thought it was worth revisiting.

The versatility of the relic system is perfect for the game, more loose and open-ended design. So relics are basically accessories you can equip two per character, such as the Maribati. That's right. The tightness of Final Fantasy 5's design is appealing in a different way, but the restrictions of the job system mean that experimentation

sometimes requires long hours of grinding. With Final Fantasy 6, changing a character's abilities is as simple as giving them a different set of relics. And if that sounds a bit like Final Fantasy 7's a materia system, that's because it is. In that sense, the game is what you make of it. Yeah, the relics or the accessories or

you call them in future games, we dialed back a lot and they were made less, the uses were less powerful or the changes were less powerful to your character. Yeah, and I think it also was like a game balance issue because the fact that you could just tweet, make your characters just nigh unvunnerable with like the right load out. Yeah, what the genji glove and the, what's the offering? Yep. Is that the double, and then two Atma weapons? Yep.

And you're just fucking owning everything. Yeah. Of course, then you have Final Fantasy 13, where all you could equip was a, was two accessories. You didn't have armor. Yeah, but Final 5013, you didn't actually play, so it doesn't matter. That's bullshit. You eventually play in hour 40.

It's a bad game. Let's move on. That's my beta hyped up arrogance again. That is. It really is. 133 is great. John Hyman says, let's see, I love that for all the talk about love in the first half of Final Fantasy 6,

Tara doesn't end up with a partner, instead becoming a mother Teresa-like figure to the orphans. It's Locke and Sellis who get the romantic arc, but they need to get over themselves and their hangups before it can begin. I think there are lessons there for all of us. Yeah, as Dr. Phil would say, you got to love yourself. Daniel Greenberg says, back in May 2017, I received my MA in computer game design, capped off with a thesis entitled Bravo, Celis, shared narrative elements in video games and opera as a framework for game appreciation. Rooted in years of research on transmediation, literacy, critique, and the nascent field of game appreciation, the real seat for that paper was planted in 1994.

I didn't really know or understand opera beyond Bugs Bunny until recent years when I began studying them closely. While attending one from the cheap seats at the Kennedy Center, an elderly gentleman and World War II vet that stayed in Italy after his service talked about his time there and how the kids in the nearby alleyways could hear the performances coming from the opera house and would sing them outside, filling the area with music. Trying to remember what moved me at that age, with such fervor, Final Fantasy 6 immediately sprang to mine. Emboldened, I rushed home and pulled an all-nighter, pouring over opera's dynamic history and creative toolkits, all the while realizing I finally found my thesis. As my appreciation for the form grew,

I started seeing all manner of similarities to what had been carefully woven into Final Fantasy 6. The overlaps were in canny, the Basso Bufo of Locke and Ultros, Maria Callis' Tosca to sell us shares, Maria, the Figuero Twins, the symbolism of Setsar Gaviani's goals, the brilliant leveraging

of stage, music, drama, and light motif, I could go on. In 1976, Will Cros' adventure came out, the same year as one of the same year, one of classical opera's last celebrated composers, Benjamin Britton, passed. I'm not saying a metaphorical torch was passed necessarily, but I am

optimistic that video games are technically equipped and more than capable of tackling and preserving opera's multimedia majesty. And I know, and no title I know of stands as better proof than Final Fantasy 6. I will link to his thesis in the show notes. Wow. That's good. That was way too intellectual for me.

I feel stupid. And if you haven't listened to Maria Callas's Tosca, it is phenomenal. Even if you're not an opera fan, an opera fan, like, my in-law has made me listen to it once on record, and I was just like, holy crap, this is... From Ben Elgin, Returnout's East Regular. Final Fantasy 6 has always been a linchpin game for me. Final Fantasy 1 introduced me to console RPG and four expanded that with real characters an expansive, and a bit cliche story,

but Six is really the one that made me an addict for years to come and convinced me to follow Squarespaceoft to whatever new console they were developing for. As the culmination of the series 2D lifespan, six really pulls out all the stops with gorgeous, detailed sprite work, an amazing light motif-based score for Weimatsu, and an explosion of characters with all their own interesting backstories and story vignettes. To this day, it remains near the top of almost any list of favorite games I may make based on any criteria. I really want to replay it on the S&S Classic.

The last time I replayed it was in 2007 when the Game Boy Advance one came out. So it's been a long time and I have played this through this game like four or five times. It's like 12 years. The only time I've ever played the game was on the GBA version because I was a Genesis kid. Now it's a new kid. So it's funny because like everybody uses this as one of their like lynchpin titles that changed their life or whatever. For me, that was like this time I was like Fantasy Star 4, which colored a lot of how I look at RPGs. So it's always been just kind of weird.

to be like, oh, I guess I just speak a different language than everybody else does. Because when I went back and played Final Fent 56, I was like, the opera is just a bunch of squawking. I don't get it. It's weird. Yeah, I wonder how I would feel if I went on the Sega Pass. I mean, it just doesn't have

the same resonance as the first time you play it when you're 13. It doesn't sound like a farting robot. I don't get it. Oh, no. Just kidding. You have locked a world of hurt. Oh, no. I think I had played it. It was so hyped up by the time I got to it that I was it's like forced in the other direction. It's true.

I bought it when it was new, so there were no expectations. I mean, the reviews were really good, and I love Final Fantasy, but it didn't have all the baggage it has today of being in its life-faging experience. From Jeff Peterson, Final Fantasy 6 is one of the games I cite as the reason my girlfriend and I became closer and eventually got married. She would rent the game from a locally owned rental shop in Sacramento, and we played it together. We loved the story and drama, the character is experienced in the first half of the game,

cried at the destruction of the world and Celis's remorse at the loss of Sid as she threw herself off the cliff. We got frustrated of the sudden freedom of the world of ruin, but enjoyed finding new areas to explore and getting all the party back together again. We struggled and eventually persevered against our most favorite villain of all time, despite Kefka's repeated attempts with

Heartless Angel and Foraken. After we graduated from high school and she went to college while I went into the military, I found a fun coland selling a used copy of Final Fantasy 6 in the box with the game manual. I didn't hesitate. I bought the game in a super NES and sent it to my wife as a present. We still pull the game out and play it

every so often, and now our kids are playing it, too. The music, graphic, story, and gameplay have truly stood the test of time. That's very heartwarming. That was a very good letter. Let's see. Jay Thompson says, On the first day of second grade, an older kid who just moved into my neighborhood joined me on the bus ride home, while becoming fast friends over a mutual love of video

games, he started be galeing me with stories of this game he had been following in game magazines. It was all the rage in Japan. It was on its way out in the U.S. soon. After gushing about how awesome it looked, he said, it'll even be better than Zelda. I laughed it off at the time. It was hardly anything I had played at that point, quite matched up to the

majesty of a link to the past. But I can't deny the game looked utterly entrancing when he finally got his hands on it. That game, of course, was Final Fantasy 6. The game was a bit too much for me when I first asked to try it out, but I eventually figured it out and became a quick fan of the franchise.

The game certainly has its flaws, and I think I was right to give a childish, childish, n'-uh, to my friends claim that it was surpassed Zelda, but it's still a wonderful game. Let's see. Yeah, man, if you had told me when I was a kid that Final Six was better than Link to the Past, I would have scoffed entirely.

I'm glad we didn't have to have that school yard fight. Jonathan A. Weinhold says a lot gets made of the music of Final Fantasy Six, but people rarely mention the sheer magnitude of what was composed. In a time where nearly all video game work was a little more than a one to two minute loop, Luw Matsu wrote not just the opera scene. That's like eight to nine minutes long, not just the music for the multi-tiered Kefka fight. but then also like 20 minutes of credits music.

The soundtrack absolutely drips of effort and care and ambition, and Uwibatsu should be thanked for it. I think his soundtracks for 7, 8, 9 were bigger, but I think 6 has the, I don't think there's a bad song in 6, frankly. I think, yeah, I think 6 is actually just, the soundtrack of 6 to me is better than all the ones that were made on the PS1. Oh, I totally agree. And it's just like, wow, that, I mean, that might be his peak, probably.

I think so, creatively. Okay, and finally, Blargh says, I replayed Final Fantasy 3, 6, via Wii Virtual Console earlier this year. For the most part, my memories hold up about the game. The music is excellent, the battle system is varied, and the graphics look good even on my HDTV. Even with the warbled lyrics,

the opera is one of the most outrageous, engaging, and fun scenarios I've ever seen in any JRP. I still gasp a little when Kefka kills Emperor Gestal and then pushes his body off the floating island. By the end of the game, my party is overpowered, and Kefka's final form went down in two turns. Makes me wish it had the endgame bosses of later Final Fantasies. I know there is a GBA version, but I can't make it past an hour with that bastardized music. So, you know, there is a patch that you can download, and this entails playing the game somewhat illegally.

Oh, God, no. But there is a patch that fixes the music. So if you own the GBA version, do not have any compunctions about getting hold of the GBA ROM and patching the music to sound the way God intended. Stick it on an Everdrive. It's great. At that point, just play the Super Nintendo ROM if you're going to go that far. Well, I think, you know, if you want to experience the additional content or the revised localization, like, you know, what happens when it's Blizarra instead of Ice 2?

I'll lose my mind. But he brings up a good point. I mean, the opera scene is very, I mean, we talk about it endlessly on here. But I feel like even that guy likes it. I don't think so. but it's hard to overstate just how important that was at the time it came out

and when I played it I thought it was emotional but that wasn't the thing that took away I took away from it the most like this is so cool like I've never seen this in a game before and I think 20 plus years of people praising that has made it like I don't know it has a different effect on people now

yeah musically it doesn't do anything for me but as a set piece it's a cool set piece in the game like how you have to keep you keep breaking different perspective Going to different perspectives, like you're above it, then you're below. So we're going to wrap this episode by talking about the Atari 7800. That episode has already gone up, and this mailbag didn't quite make it in, but it's not too late.

Bastion Nocera says, I'm the guy who lives in 1983. My story with the 7800 will likely be disappointing to Atari fans, but I thought it would provide a good example of mini a near Atari owner. In 1989, I knew I wanted a game console, and I also knew my parents weren't that well off. The three cheapest consoles were the $2,600, about $78 at the time in French francs, the 7,800, which is about 90, and the Sega Master System about 120. Friends of the family had a $2,600, and I could borrow cartridges if we bought any of the Atari systems. I poured over the catalogs during much of December, but just before heading off to the supermarket,

my dad looked at the Atari graphics, said they weren't better, much better than the Thompson 8-bit micro we already had, decided on the master system. What the hell is this? It's French. Okay. I think him every time the Wonderboy 3, Alex Kid, or Golden Axe Warriors, ditties, pop into my head. In hindsight, the 7,800 wasn't that much

more powerful than the 2,600, or didn't look at, and the economics just didn't add up compared to the master system. From nearly an Atari owner. Dodged a bullet there, man. Really? Yeah. I don't know. 7800 is an okay system.

I guess. It's about on par in terms of the, I guess, this master system had fantasy star. Yeah, but the master system had Fantasy Star. Here we go. Okay. That is true. I actually agree with you on that. I mean, and Alf.

Yeah. It was better than the 7800, man. That's like, I think that's just objective. For 7800. All right. From Steve Langerhulk. I was one of the few and proud to have an Atari 7800. My parents bought my brother and I as 2,600 years earlier, we were hooked.

At the time the 7,800 came out, I already had friends who had the NES, but my 9-year-old brain probably doubted the future of this newcomer on the scene and wanted to stick with Atari. I don't remember what occasion it was that my parents got the system for me, but I was pretty happy with it, despite never really mastering that controller with its weird button placement. Looking at the list of cartridges I had for the system, I realized everything I had was a port from some other system.

But Ballblazer looked amazing, and Jouse looked so much better than the 2,600 version. And I somehow found Robotron 2084 in joyable. just using one controller despite trying the dual controller set up once or twice. I was thrilled I could finally play a version of choplifter at home

and Karatica was the only game I own that had an ending so far as I know. But I never did learn to deal with that damn bird. A year or two later, my brother and I probably realized Atari was in the future based on the NES games we saw at our friend's house. We pulled together our allowance and money

and bought an NES and RIGAR. Oh, good ending. RIGAR is great. I'm going to make some friends with this one. Really? I mean, who are the Atari 7,800 diehards out there? There's a few. I will fight you in the streets. And I'm like, you know what, man? God bless.

Enjoy yourself with that thing. Yeah. It's fun to like things. Knock yourself out. Dr. Ias says, the 7800 was our family's first system bought way late, well into 1989, by a visiting uncle. And I'm pretty sure that pole position two was the first home game console or first home console video game I ever played. I don't remember buying any of its exclusives at all, but we didn't have a cousin who gave us a giant. cardboard box filled with the various Atari cards

you didn't want. So there were definitely a lot of games we must have played. They could have a lot of nostalgia for the thing, but no, I can't remember even as an eight-year-old thinking that these games were mostly just time-wasters. And it wasn't until I bought a super Nintendo for myself years later that I felt like video games were something I really wanted to sink my time into.

That said, Ms. Pac-Man, Kubbert, and Keystone Capers are games I regularly return to and enjoy. Things like Spider-Man and Jungle Hunt with its fairly racist natives were things I distinctly remember mocking with friends at the time, like good little progressives. Out of his time.

Are really good, though. I really, really enjoyed playing Cuban, especially on the N.S. Is the Miss Pac-Man for 7,800 notoriously good? Or something? It is good, yes. I've never played that version of it. Actually, Miss Pac-Man is not bad on Atari 2,600, but the 7800 version

is good. Aaron Brightweiser says, I only had a 2,600 as a kid, but acquired a 7,800 a few years ago, and instantly fell in love with the system. It presents an interesting sort of alt-hism history of gaming. I imagine a world where the 7-800 got its 1984 release, ideally with a built-in pokey sound chip, and wonder what the world would have been like if Atari consoles had

continued being relevant. You know, my uncle used to work at the Atari factory in Sunnyvale, building the original consoles. Oh, wow. So he built the – he worked on the factory floor when he moved here to the States from India, and he had built 2,600 and 5200s. I think by the time the 7,800 did come out, he had already left working at Atari. I remember we used to get, like, carts and stuff from the factory floor.

Did he also apply, like, the fake wood panel sticker to the consoles? I think he was doing, like, the soldering of the board. He actually lumbered the trees. We'll wrap this up pretty quick. Matthew Wachter says, The 7,800 was like a strange acquaintance growing up. A friend of mine always seemed to have the newest and best things. I have fond memories of my eight-year-old mind being blown on a regular basis

by the coolest of most technologically advanced games. of the day on his Apple 2. The one thing that never quite seemed to fit the mold of his pampered lifestyle was that he willfully asked his parents for a 7,800 instead of N.S. I remember reluctantly going down to his basement to play pole position, an impossible mission on a huge rear projection TV. Oh, my God. Pearls before swine.

I used to bring him copies of Nintendo Power and tried to get him to come over to play EniS at my house whenever possible, but he just wouldn't listen. What was wrong with him? Was he abused as a child? Does his parents brainwash him with anti-Japanese sentiment? I think this may have irreparably damaged our friendship. Or does he actually just have an NES in the hidden in the background that he just didn't show you? So you'd force you to play the 7800.

Actually, I was incorrect. I said pearls before swine. It's the reverse of that. Like, is there an aphorism for that? Swine before pearls? Maybe. It's like. Making a silk pouch out of a purse.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know. Right in your favorite aphorism to Retronats. Hey, kids. I'll read it on the air. One last letter. Kevin Richardson. I grew up an Atari kid as at the time I didn't know

video games by any other name. We had Atari's 5200, so when the time came, the 7800 was the natural progression. Eventually I got caught up in Nintendo fever after playing Contra and Life Force at a friend's house. When I started proposing Nintendo NES as a possible future birthday or Christmas gift, I heard these dreaded words. You already have a video game system.

I finally saved up enough money for myself for a Nintendo entertainment system around the time Super NES came. out, but I wouldn't trade my time with 7,800 for anything. It instilled with me a love for the classic arcade games, despite not having any actual arcades around where I grew up.

The 7,800 had great versions of everything from Zevius and Miss Pac-Man and Gallagher to the original Mario Brothers. With backwards compatibility, you could play the 2,600s of Berserk, warlords, and space invaders. So, that's... I can see that being appealing if you have...

To grow up around no arcades in that era, wow. Yeah. So, you know, um... Life is hard sometimes. No, I feel like it's good to have a love of arcades instilled in you, however it happens. And the 7800 was a good console, as we talked about in our episode. It just... There's nothing wrong with it.

It just came out of the wrong time. Yeah. Well, yeah, it came out three years too late. That's the problem. It should have come out much sooner, but it didn't. And that's the entire discussion that we had with the Atari 7800 episode of Retronauts. Look it up. It's on the Internet.

Now consoles come out before the company is ready, like the Switch. And I love the Switch, but it's just like... Where's your online, buddy? Cloud saves. A meeting interface, what? It'll come in the 2020, yeah. Very exciting. Yeah, so that wraps it up for this Retronauts Micro.

Thanks, everyone who wrote in. Tried to read pretty much everyone's letters. I'm sorry that I had to abridge many of them, but you guys are verbose. I feel like I'm verbose, but y'all blow me away. So anyway, thanks again for writing in. Thank you, Shibum. Thank you, Bob. This has been Retronauts Micro, which, of course, you can find.

along with other episodes of Retronauts at Retronauts.com on iTunes, on the Podcast One network, and through Patreon, which is how we're supported and can do this podcast and related ancillary projects full-time, go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, and you can download episodes of this show a week in advance at a higher bit rate than they are released to the public with no ads. It's a very, very good deal. I think you take us up on it. You won't regret it. Anyway, guys, where do we find you on the Internet? I'm Shivan Bhutt. You can find me on Twitter at Electrotal, E-L-E-K-T-R-O-T-A-L, and at my podcast, Commander, and where I talk about Magic Gathering every Wednesday, which is at Commander and MTG. Hey, it's Bob Mackie, and I am a full-time podmonger. And my other podcasts are Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons,

and what a cartoon. That is, we do a different cartoon of a different series every week. and you can find those on anywhere for free, any place you listen to the podcast, but I also have a Patreon that I do most of my living off of. That's a Talking Simpsons. I go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And for the price of $5 a month, you can get all of our goodie bonus content for five bucks. That includes Season 1 of Talking Simpsons, all of Talking Futurama.

That's season one of Futurama. We do the Talk Simpsons Treatment, Talking Critic interviews with Simpsons writers and showrunners and so much more. And I recommend you do the combo deal. You give to Retronauts for three. You give the Talking Simpsons for five. That is the price of your average burrito in America. And instead of eating a burrito, you can have all these podcasts just coming at you weekly, just unstoppable podcasts. So that's my suggestion.

Go to. It's healthier, too. It's very good. Yeah. Skip the burrito. The carbs are going to kill you anyways. But go to Patreon. com slash Talking Simpsons.

And we will get you out of the burrito lifestyle and into the podcasting lifestyle. And I am Jeremy Parrish. You can find me living a carb-free existence. at GameSpite on Twitter, mostly carb-free. I do like chocolate. Anyway, thanks everyone for writing in and thanks everyone else for listening and we'll be back with a full-length

extravaganza episode. I don't know I'm gonna'n't know I'm a... I'm... ...andah... I don't know. I'm going to be able to be.

Please. ...you know. ...toe... ...and... ...and... ...you... ...and... Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service.

Watch more than 100 TV channels and thousands of movies on demand all for free. No credit card needed and no sign up. Pluto TV is the easy and completely legal way to watch your favorite TV shows and hit movies. What are you waiting for? Never pay for TV again. Download Pluto TV for free on all your favorite devices today. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel rober. Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect. last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.