Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 420: Retronauts 15th Anniversary Mailbag

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Can you believe it? Our little podcast has now been around for 15 years! (That's the crystal anniversary for all of you out shopping for gifts.) So instead of reflecting on classic games this week, we've decided to do some self-reflection by talking about where we've been, where we are, and where we're going on this wacky rollercoaster ride we call "podcasting." And, in the back of half of this episode, we respond to your questions and comments about 15 years of Retronauts. Thanks again for all your support, and here's to 15 more! Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. This week on Retronaut, it's a Retronaut about Retronauts. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey, and this week's topic is the 15th anniversary mailbag. Yes, that's correct, because as of October 4th, 2021, Retronauts is now. now 15 years old, which means we're currently in our 16th year of podcasting. And if you didn't know this, we cover the origins of retronauts with some very special guests for the 10th anniversary back in episode 78. But this time around, we're going to reflect on our independent years where we are now and read and respond to your questions and comments.

So who's here with me today? It's me, Jeremy Parrish, here to celebrate the Retronauts Kinsenera. He's the perfect guy. He took me back to the old days of living in West Texas and celebrating my friend's 15th anniversary, or 15 birthdays. You know, I've never been to one. Should we have some sort of food out or something here? Like, what's the normal, like, catering?

There should definitely be a mariachi band. Okay. That is a thing that is done. Food-wise, you know, whatever. Whatever tastes good. I will edit in some mariachi music throughout this episode to make it feel more fitting. But yes, I guess now we are, we have grown from girls into women. Is that how that works?

That is correct. Okay, excellent. So Jeremy's here, of course, obviously. here. Just me and Jeremy for this one for this celebration. And I want to bring up some fun stats first, Jeremy. Fun and scary stats. So I did some math. And we're just talking about the independent year starting in 2013. So I want to let everyone know just how many things we've done so far. So this is episode 420. And then we have 27 episodes of Retronaut's Pocket and 95 episodes of Retronauts micro. Towards the end, the micros are getting to be as long as regular episodes. So counting all of our total release, we have made a 542 podcast, not counting any non-numbered ones that happened to be in our feed. Because I know there was a few live shows that aren't numbered, a few specials that aren't numbered. But yeah, close to 550, let's say. So that's a lot.

We've eclipsed everything that was done on one-up, both in terms of years and episodes. So 542, that's a lot. It is really a lot of podcasts. That's a lot of talking, really. It really is. And I just know that means if you or I, pass away at some point in the future. It's probably going to happen. They can reconstruct everything we've ever said, because I think we have each recorded every word in the human

language at this point. That's true. They've got lots of phenomes to work from. Yes. So I want my hologram to be appearing at future podcast conventions, like a PRGE, 2050, let's say. Let's be more hopeful. 2060, you can meet Bob Mackie's hologram next to a very... Yeah, I mean, I plan to be out on the road, you know, when I'm 80 or so. It's the only thing we'll be able to do right then. But I want to talk about old video games, nothing else. It's the only thing I can do, which is why I'm here. So I want to talk about Jeremy, where we've been since we've restarted the podcast independently.

We moved to Patreon, everything that's happened since then. So a brief memory refresher. So we're at this website called OneUp.com. Sometimes it's still online. Sometimes it isn't. It depends on the weather. What the servers, what the mood the server is in. But it once existed in a complete format.

OneUp shut down in February of 2013. And then Jeremy, myself and Ray Barnhill got together and kickstarted Retronauts. And by July of 2013, that is when the podcast formally started. And outside of one kind of hiatus between the Kickstarter and the Patreon seasons, we have just done this nonstop for the past nearly nine years. Pretty much. Yeah. You know, I had a, this is, this is honest, God's honest truth.

I had a dream last night when I was in the middle of like, you know, covering from a simultaneous COVID booster and flu shot and just like having intense sleep and night sweats. I dreamed that I stopped at the IGN offices to visit Kat Bailey to talk about something. And while I was there, I stumbled into a staff meeting where they were announcing that all video game publications were being shut down and handed me a pink slip for Retronauts. I was like, you can't do this. Retronauts is independent.

So, you know, these memories, these memories have stuck with me. These scars go deep. If you ever have a chance to visit the office, Jeremy, you need to find the one-up server and just whack it with something because it's somewhere in that building, as far as I know. It can't be off-site. Yeah, I don't know. It's probably like just, you know, an old Mac 2C.E or something, you know, from 1988, running in a closet underneath the table. You know, they laid off the guy, the only guy who cared about the server. So, of course, you know, you get rid of that, that person.

And he did it if Michael Zax, you know, kept it going for a while out of the goodness of his heart. But eventually it was just like, I don't know these people anything. By these people, he meant, you know, Zip Davis and IGN. So, yeah, good relations. If we can raise enough money to get him to receive an IT person salary, I think we can restart one up. Other than that, I have all of my articles on Google Docs, and that's all I can tell you. I mean, I actually made a serious business proposal. to buy the name oneup.com and restart the site after they shut it down.

Like I put together funding and everything. We were talking like, you know, potential multi-million dollar deal to acquire all this stuff. But they were just like, no, no, that's too valuable. So then they proceeded to sit on their asses and do nothing with it for eight years. And that's where we're today. Business with Zip Davis. Yes. Good smart people.

A great company that deserves to still exist. And yeah, OneUp shut down. and spring of 2013, and we went to Kickstarter, and I will say upon retrospection or reflection, rather, Kickstarter, not the best way to fund a podcast because the whole lump something works for some kind of projects, but I feel like, especially if you're new to funding this kind of thing, it was a struggle kind of to figure out, like, you know, how do we pay for this? How much do we pay ourselves? I don't think we were paying ourselves anything really from the Kickstarter. I don't think we took anything personally. We got a pittance. Yeah, I think I like, I paid for, um, an extra week stay in a very inexpensive Japanese hotel, uh, when I was at Tokyo Game Show. That's, that's what I bought with that. That was like $900 of, of hotel. The very, that was my, that was my, my personal take from the Kickstarter. The very first year was a laborer love it. It was all of us working for free, basically, even though, you know, travel was paid for and our, and our food was paid for when we would travel and, you know, we rented our studio with that money. But, luckily, Patreon became a very viable form for funding podcasts, although the platform was not ready for podcasts until a few years after we actually joined. So not all of our podcasts are actually in the RSS feed because they did not have RSS feeds until maybe about a year or so

after we joined Patreon in 2014. But we were some of the first people there for podcasts. Yeah, the, you know, I'm frustrated that, you know, especially you and Bob ended up basically doing the Kickstarter stuff for free, because that was never the intention. You guys were out of work, so I wanted this to be like a way for you guys to make some money after getting unceremoniously laid off by large corporations. And that didn't really pan out. So I feel, I've always felt bad about that. But Patreon has proven, you know, like a way for us to actually be able to afford food and

health care and things like that, which is nice. And I had kind of tested the waters in advance with my video projects. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I kind of, you know, put that out there and figured out over the course of a few years, like, what's the best way to do this? And sort of midway through that process, we came into Patreon. And, you know, so there was still a learning process for podcasts involved. But I kind of, you know, experimented with like per, like an a la carte approach where I wasn't sure how frequently I was going to publish. So then people would support me by paying per episode that I posted. But then I got really kind of doing it on a regular basis and realized, like, like, man, this is really going to, you know, rip some people's, you know, their, their bank accounts if I keep going like this. So I changed it to a, like, just, you know, support me for X amount per month.

And I think that's the most, the way most people do things unless they are very sporadic. Yeah. You know, that seems to be a good way to go. And I continue to be grateful for just the fact that this, this platform exists. I'm not totally happy about all of Patreon's business maneuvers and decisions. especially once the venture capitalists came in and said, oh, you have to do things in the capitalistic way. But, you know, Patreon was basically a realization of a kind of an idle wish that I had,

you know, 10 or 15 years ago thinking I wish there were like a setup, kind of like the Renaissance, you know, patron system where someone wealthy would say, hey, Michelangelo, come paint ceilings for me and basically I'll pay for you to exist. And, you know, I thought it would be really cool to have something like that for creating media, but that would never work. And then Patreon came along and was basically that, but kind of dispersed among, you know, not lots of wealthy people, but many, many people who have just normal incomes who make it possible for us to do stuff and have a normal income by doing things that large companies wouldn't really pay us for. It's great to know and very satisfying to know that if you're at a website, you can write an article that makes, I don't know, 100,000 hits, 500,000 hits, 500,000 hits and still get laid off. But with a Patreon, my experience has been you basically need 2,000 people to support you and you can live in the Bay Area of all places, like one of the

most expensive places to live. And that's been very fulfilling to me where I can worry about, you know, entertaining my audience and giving them what they want and not worry about, you know, I need to write about Game of Thrones today or whatever the next topic is. And as far as the platform goes, I don't know how much you would disagree with me on this one, Jeremy, but I'm not just saying this because they're my sole source of income, but I've been very happy with Patreon. And the few times they've messed up, they really have corrected themselves. There's been a few changes they made behind the scenes that people were upset about, and they reverted them. The venture capitalist thing is always a problem because, you know, everybody wants exponential growth.

Patreon makes a ton of money just being landlords for content. They're just collecting money by hosting things and interviewing not that much. so I feel like for the past few years I've been nothing but happy and the only things that I want from them are them to improve the platform in ways that I think still need to be improved like I really wish that we could get separate

RSS feeds for one Patreon especially with my podcast because we have multiple mini-series but they're all just in one big feed from five years and I think like if we could divide our podcast into yearly feeds it'd be easier to find some stuff

and maybe even put some of those old podcasts that are just uploaded put those on a feed too on Patreon But as far as I'm concerned, like, nothing has really shaken my confidence in them. And this may be just speaking to the state of, you know, internet writing and being an internet media. But this has been the most stable job I've ever had in my entire life and the one that's lasted the longest. The one where I can actually get raises and, you know, have health insurance and stuff. Like, it's the most fulfilling and stable job I've ever had.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have any major complaints about Patreon. I just, you know, I'm not crazy about some of the business end type. things. Like, you know, for example, if, uh, if we wanted the ability for you to be able to log in independently to Patreon without saying, hey, can you tell me what the two-factor authentication number that just showed up on your phone is, that would cost us like $9,000 or $10,000 a year, which seems like a lot of money to pay for me not to have to check my phone at random hours. So, you know, little things like that are kind of annoying. But no, on the whole, like I'm, I'm grateful that Patreon exists and, you know, between Retronauts and my video patron, Patreon,

I am, you know, financially stable, which is cool, you know, in a way that, and, you know, obviously I have a job at limited run games, which, you know, that allows me to basically have the foundation to be able to use the money I get from Patreon for, like, video stuff, to actually buy the things I need for my video Patreon, which I've gotten really expensive now that retro games have gone up into this huge bubble, but I'm able to actually have the materials I need to cover for videos and books and for podcasts without going into hawk, you know, because basically people enjoy what I'm creating, what we're creating enough to support us. And so it makes it possible for us to create more stuff. So it's great. And as more people join Patreon, we become a smaller

fish in a bigger pond, although we can still, you know, support the podcast, pay ourselves, pay people to host and do art. But I feel like even though, you know, there are much bigger podcasts on Patreon now, my philosophy is, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships. And I just like the idea that Patreon is now the kind of de facto content source in terms of you paying creators. They've just become the de facto way to pay creators and get a little something more for your money. And I will say that some people, we'll talk more about our changes over the years, but some people weren't very happy about the paywall most people were but even if you're not happy about it it's still uh i feel that five bucks a month is not a lot to pay for people being able to work

independently and i put my money where my mouth is this is not just me saying like i'm superior to everybody but i actually give a lot of money to patreon because i believe in it and i believe in creators and i've seen too many friends get laid off uh and had to go into uh you know non-creative professions because there were just no other outlet and the people that are still hanging on in there, I don't want them to be able to have to give up on what they do. I just want this to be the default platform. And yeah, I do want to talk about that Patreon reboot because that was, I think, the biggest change for us in terms of the content we make because it was a big band-aid to pull off because there is this idea and a lot of people still can't shake the idea that because they started as free, podcasts should just remain free forever. They should just be free content because for the most part, podcasts.

when they first started, there were a lot of independent ones, but mostly it was like, oh, MPR is going to put their radio shows online for you to download. Or OneUp has things to promote. We're going to make a bunch of podcasts. So you go to the website and read the articles. Maybe the person who wrote the article will talk about it. But now podcasts are much different. Podcasts, no website wants them anymore.

And if they have them, their legacy shows that actually do make money for them through merch or through just pure exposure. But yeah, for the most part, podcasts are the, these independent entities, and they are labor. And I feel like I'm glad people are coming around to the idea that, yes, for the most part, podcasts are free, but it's fine if you want to charge for just a little more. Yeah, I mean, you know, every episode of Retronauts that I put together, that's, I don't know, it's between 10 and 20 hours of work for me, playing together notes, researching stuff, playing stuff, watching stuff.

I mean, we're working on a Twin Peaks episode. I'm sitting down and watching 40 hours of Twin Peaks, so I know what we're going to be talking about because I had never actually seen it before now. So, yeah, I do a lot of kind of time investment into retronauts. It's not just a thing where we sit down and read off Wikipedia at you despite what some people would like to say. And, yeah, it's a, you know, I appreciate not having to do all that work for free

because at some point I have to, you know, pay for food and, you know, support my family and things like that. So it's good to be able to do those things. Yeah. And we didn't know how people would respond to it. And we weren't sure, although we know our audience is great, obviously. They stuck with us for this long. But it was unprecedented, both the response and the pandemic that happened a few months afterwards, after we made all these major changes. But because of that, we've almost like tripled our revenue. And because of that, we can now, you know, off a a lot of what we used to do on our own onto other talented people like Jeremy used

to do a ton of the artwork yourself now you have a lot of people doing the artwork for your podcast. I still have my friend Nick Daniel do the art for mine and then we have people like Diamond Fight they put our episodes up on the blog they have their own column and weekly podcast they're a new host now

and we also have newer hosts like Nadia and Stewart as well so instead of us having to come up with six podcasts between us do all the editing do all the artwork work, do all the posting, which is what we used to do up until, I don't know, 2019. I forget when we actually brought editors along, but editors have been a major help in getting all of these podcasts out on time because that's another major time sync.

So without all these people, we could not function the way we are, and without having to change the Patreon, we could not pay for all of this extra help. Yeah, I'm a big believer in, you know, people who do things for me shouldn't do those things for free. It's, you know, it just doesn't seem fair. I've always been big on making sure that I try to pay people for work that they do for me. And it's nice to be able to do that. I don't consider, you know, the contributions we get to the site and to the show to be offloading, though.

I mean, I guess editing maybe because that's really time consuming and pretty challenging. And our editors are great. But, you know, for me, it's an opportunity to bring in, you know, really talented artists whose work I admire and work with them. and to have people who I think are great, you know, have great personalities, are, you know, unique viewpoints and to be able to pay them to create stuff for us. That's not, that's not offloading to me. That's like, that's an opportunity. And, you know, especially like in the case of Nadia, but also a diamond too, to a certain degree. Like Nadia has written stuff for me for more than almost 20 years. You know, since I basically started at oneup.com, I was like, hey, would you like

to freelance for me. And she jumped on board right away. And, uh, you know, I tried for years to get her hired at one up and then at US Gamer. And when she was finally hired at US Gamer, uh, I quit. Not because of her. Just I was fed up with it. And so we've never really had the chance to work together properly in a, you know, kind of normal professional capacity. So bringing her on as a co-host was, uh, just me kind of trying to write that wrong and in whatever way I could. So, yeah, like, it's, it's been really, it's made me really happy to have just all these different perspectives and different styles and takes as part of the show, because I don't want it to just be me and you. I wanted to be a lot of perspectives.

Yeah. Both of us kind of have pretty similar viewpoints on things, pretty similar perspectives. Someone like Stewart, who grew up in the UK, a few years after us, not so much. Someone like Nadia, actually we have pretty similar taste, but, you know, she's still going to bring a very different point of view to things. Same with Diamond. You know, they're a huge S&K fan, whereas I'm totally indifferent to S&K except for NeoGeo Pocket Color. So, you know, it just brings in more variety, more personality and makes the show broader and, you know, more appealing to more people and able to better speak to the breadth of video game history. of just like, it's me, the kid who grew up with a Nintendo. How many of those are their creating content on the internet? Yeah, perhaps offloading was a poor choice of words. I think I was only just thinking of the editing because I'm, as much as I love editing podcast and I still do a few every year just because they're the special ones like the

Christmas one I like to edit. It's a lot of work and I'm so grateful to my editor, Alex, for doing it. I know you've got a few editors yourself, Jeremy, just. But yeah, I've just won actually great. And he'll be on an episode pretty soon. Excellent. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't trying. to like take you to task for that that's okay but yeah i i kind of agree like i actually think i have a knack

for editing and i feel like i'm pretty good at it me too yeah but you know after after doing those musical episodes which you know that would be like 10 hours of editing uh to get those together i realized i can't keep doing this anymore this is going to kill me um thankfully the uh you know the supply chain shortages this year have meant that there haven't really been that many vinyl releases so it's going to be a while before i do another music episode but yeah um getting getting help on that front it's just so time consuming and so laborious and as much as i kind of hate giving up that kind of control um you know i i worked really closely with gregg and he's been really great about uh taking feedback and you know after a while i was just able to step

back and say you've got it you know just go for it and i always really enjoy the music choices he comes up with i think he makes really smart savvy edits and you know when there's something that i reach out to him and say like hey you know here's a problem with this episode be on the lookout for this he's been great about fixing it when he's noticed audio issues that i didn't even notice he said you know i took some steps to fix these up so you know i would say honestly like offloading if you will the editing process has for me like for my episodes has improved them yeah and uh so again you know it's just great to have that that kind of freedom to turn us into you know a real proper production. Like it was kind of in the one-up days when, you know, Andrew Fister was the guy at

the console who was always kind of silently, you know, putting his hand on his earpiece and doing the countens and nodding. And then he'd, you know, take the episode and the next day you'd have like this beautifully presented piece of content that was just wonderful. Yeah, they were great. You were like, wow, did I make this? And yeah, it's good to be able to do that even though we're independent now and not tied to a large corporation with dozens of extremely talented journalists. Yeah. Yeah, I think delegating might be a better word because it's with a personal project like this, it can't be hard to let go of certain things because you really want to take ownership of it. Like at one point in my life, I was doing retronauts, editing all of those,

posting all of those. And I was also doing Talking Simpsons on top of a full-time job, not editing those, but it was still like hosting a weekly podcast. I don't know how I found time for it, but I did. But even then, it was hard to let go at first. But the people that we've hired have done such a great job of taking over that aspect of the show. And I'm very, very happy with the fact that we can afford it now. So when you see the Patreon total, so much of that goes into just a lot of the labor that goes into the show beyond hosting and posting. There's just so much that goes into it. And again, like you said, Jeremy, I'm glad that we have these different voices.

Not two white guys born kind of in the same time period with the same upbringing-ish. And this, like, yeah, like 200 miles apart. Yes, exactly. Both suburban, but like different climates, I guess. Yeah, we're both kind of from the Midwest. I grew up in a different area than you moved to Texas, but still, like, there's still that background there. So, yeah, just kind of the destiny, I think, of us to kind of, you know, end up in the same areas in a lot of ways. So, yeah, having that variety is really important to me. And if you don't want to talk about the past anymore, Jeremy, I don't think there's anything else you want to cover as far as the Patreon or the Kickstarter campaign or just what. being independent has been like.

A lot of the questions actually address that, but I do want to move on to the future unless you have anything else you wanted to say. No, I mean, I look back at the kind of early days of the show. I feel like people probably will want to hear some talk about the very beginning early days of retronauts. And, you know, that was such a frustrating process at times because there were a few people at One Up

who really were into the idea of having a classic gaming show. Thankfully, Sam Kennedy, the EIC of One Up, was very, very into it and loved the show. You know, he always enjoyed the fact that I had, you know, kind of these strong interest in classic gaming. That was one of the reasons he hired me. And Andrew Fister was always a big supporter of the show. And since he was the podcast producer, that counted for a lot.

And then, of course, we had, you know, the kind of regulars who would be on the show like Shane Bettenhausen. But, you know, generally there was just kind of a disdain for the idea of having a show that wasn't specifically about a publication or like current events in gaming and there was a lot of disdain for podcasting in general. A lot of the early

days of the podcasting process at one up was very much magazine editors under duress. Yeah. And it wasn't until, you know, they figured out how to find their own voice that I think they warmed up to it. Like I don't know if some of the publications ever warmed up to it. But, you know, computer gaming world

went from being like, God, this to, hey, we're the brodieo and you know like people love that it was a it was a great show one of the the all time great video game podcast yeah i was a big fan they had it took it took them yeah it took them time to kind of find that voice and until then you know there was just like a sort of general grumbling resentment but but for some reason that that really shifted onto retronauts a lot and uh so it it made it frustrating and um yeah you know once we once we moved to ig and it became even more frustrating because they kind of did the sacking of Rome with one-ups podcasting equipment. And we're like, oh, all this good stuff.

Yes, we're going to use this now. And if you're lucky, sometimes you can use the podcasting room. Also, do you take time to edit your shows? That's weird. I was scolded by an unnamed employee first, having the temerity to say that I edit my podcasts. Yeah. In that time period, yeah, sorry. In that time period, I was just used to being done with a podcast and looking up to see faces

sneering at me through the window like i i booked my time in this room it's not over right it's not over yeah yeah so just in general like the i feel like the corporate environment is just it's not good for podcasts which is a shame because there's so much merit to this medium but uh for whatever reason it just doesn't fit uh i guess the the corporate idea of what content should be so yeah moving independently has been great because instead of being you know constantly hounded by uh you know, executives and management who want to know what their hell we're doing or other podcasters who are like, get the hell out of our studio. It's our turn. We're coming in early. It's just, you know, thousands of people who tune in or I guess download weekly to the show,

listen to it, say, this is great. I want more of it. Here's three, five dollars a month and keep it going. And, you know, knowing that we're doing this for an appreciative audience who genuinely care about what we have to say even if they don't always agree with our opinions or you know can point out that we're wrong about something it's still it's you know having having things nitpicked by by retronauts listeners now is much more pleasant than it was in the one-up days and yeah it's just it's just a positive environment and even without really being able to travel that much this year which you know kind of slowly getting back into that having to do these podcasts remotely which i'm not really great at. It's still been just miles beyond anything that that kind of defined the early

days. And I feel that really comes through in the quality of shows now. Like I go back and listen to the early podcast and even, you know, putting aside some of the language that was used and just kind of some of the fact that we've all grown up as human beings and have, you know, more knowledge about the topics and more maturity as human beings. Like just the, the organization the structure, the depth, the sincerity and passion of the podcast is much greater now. I know some people really love the chaos and craziness of the older podcast, but, you know, that's fine. Some people like different things. But for me, the tone of retronauts now and just the, I would say the merit and, you know, the quality of it is just so much higher and makes me so much, you know, prouder to be part of it.

It's great to be able to, you know, be involved with something fairly continuously for 15 years and be able to look back and say, oh, yeah, this is, this has gotten way better. You know, you look at, you look at like rock bands that are around for 15 years and, you know, the album released in year 15 is generally not as good as the album released in year one. Yes. No, I think we're getting better. And I think what people like about the early episodes, Jeremy, there's more of a punk rock field of them because, I mean, I was in that situation. in which a podcast is one of ten things you're doing that day. You're thinking about a review that needs to go live. You're thinking about an embargo.

You're thinking about how precarious your job is. And if you should be looking for other jobs, perhaps. There's a lot of stress, a lot of pressure. A lot of that made for fun podcast because they're a little more wild. But I like the fact that for a day of my life now, I can just sit down and say, today is my retronauts day of the week. I'm going to sit down and take notes, watch all the videos I can, read all the interviews I can. and hopefully I'll have an episode's worth of notes.

If not, I can take another day and no one will be yelling at me. This is my career and I want to make the best podcast I can. I was trying to do that one up, but obviously, you know, we had to do so many other things, which is why, you know, a lot of the episodes are rougher. They had, you know, some incomplete facts or we didn't have time to go over everything. But now we can focus. And I think that's why now we are doing one game at a time for the most part

outside of like a crappy license game, which I like to cover. I don't do those one at a time, but I feel like now we can just focus on one game because you and I can sit down and say, let's read everything about it, let's play through it again, let's get the best people on for this and really focus on one thing. I would also say that, you know, another difference between then and now is that there wasn't really an organized concrete approach to curating information about old video games online in 2006. Yeah. Like Wikipedia's, you know, their list of NES games, it wasn't complete. And you didn't have fan wikis and things like that. Now, you know, like you can go and look at a series and basically, you know, the overview of the Mario series or something is going to be pretty much the same as a Mario episode of Retronauts from 2008 or whatever. Like we kind of covered the material that now comprises like, you know, a main fan wiki. page. And, you know, that that wasn't out there at the time. So, you know, I would say even, even those kind of like more overview style episodes, it was still content that wasn't, didn't really exist otherwise online. And, you know, it's just, you know, the nature of information that's available, the nature of the internet has changed over time. And so we've adapted

the show to reflect that. You know, I, it would be kind of pitiful, I think, if we, we're still doing shows in the exact same format as 2008. But we're not. Like we've adapted the show. We've expanded it. We've really started to go deeper into topics and, you know, try to do more research and just get more granular with game design concepts and, you know,

the relationships and connections between one game and others. And, you know, I don't want this to sound like we're just patting ourselves on our back about how much ass we kick. I mean, you know, to a degree, sure, yes, okay. We can do this once every, every five. years. But, you know, it's more than that. It's like I'm, I am proud of the work that we're doing.

But, you know, I feel like it just had to evolve or fade away to our relevance. And we decided to say, well, let's, you know, let's roll with how the nature of online information has changed and, you know, change our podcast accordingly. And I think the results have been really good. I really like some of the deep dive series we do. And I'm looking forward to expanding into more of those. We recorded a Pokemon Generation 1 Deep dive a few weeks ago with Kat Bailey

and Sheven Butt and Casey DeFreitas from IGN and I thought well we'll probably get through the first generation Pokemon games this episode but we ended up talking so much that we're probably going to need to do another one to really kind of

cover the full gamut of that generation of games whereas you know back in the early days 2006 2007 we just did a Pokemon episode that covered everything. That wouldn't fly now. That's okay because people, I think, are hungry to hear, you know, not just information, but reminiscences and opinions and memories about all these experiences that they shared. Yeah, not to do all too much on the past.

We'll get to the future soon. But you're right. The online information database of knowledge has really changed where in 2006 to 2000, probably nine or so, maybe even later, you couldn't just say, what is this game like? I'll go online and watch an entire long play of it. Now, if there's a game that exists, there is a long play of it on YouTube without commentary. You can see every level, see every boss, see how it plays.

That is so useful if I don't have time to play a game or if I can't access it. It's just the entire gameplay is there just waiting for me to experience not hands-on, but as a viewer. Yeah, unfortunately, you know, the tools for revisiting games are getting better. Like, you know, I'm not really a big fan of emulating games and it's nothing to do with ethics or anything like that. It's just like, to me, the experience, the, you know, the things like the input. delay, that just really breaks a game's enjoyment for me. And there are so many more ways to play games without emulating them now, without actually buying like the original arcade machine. If you have a mister or something like that, or, you know, like a clone console or original

console with a flash ram card for playing, you know, for loading cartridges on or, you know, game rombs onto, you have access to pretty much the library of Alexandria and it's growing constantly as more cores come out from Mr. And it really, you know, being able to play games that way is a great reminder of like, oh, yeah, this is what that was really like. And, you know, or it's a great way to experience a game that you've never played before and kind of get something that feels pretty close to the arcade experience.

And so that's been really valuable for me and for kind of putting myself in the right mindset and really, you know, going back and playing an old game I'd never played before and being able to really enjoy it and get the most out of it. Yeah, and even if it's legal emulation, there are so many ways to play games now, so many collections coming out, the Switch, not quite as versatile as virtual console, but there's still an okay selection of, like, Netflix-style library of games. Now they've expanded with Genesis and N64, so I think the idea is now, it was kind of a novelty on virtual console, but the idea is now just like, oh, we'll just always make these available in some way. Well, and, you know, even if you look beyond Nintendo Switch online, you have all the arcade archives games coming from Hamster. they release a game every week

and have been doing that since the switch launched nearly five years ago that is that's like 200 250 games almost and some of them they've started to dig really deep like there are games that you know I recently covered a game called Pop Flamer by Jalico on you know for the SG 1000 version I did it did a video on that I was like what the hell is this game I have no idea

and then if you know like a month later pop Flamer came out on arcade archives, which, you know, bad timing, but still it's like really kind of going way off into the weeds, but, but it's great because it means that there are all these kind of forgotten arcade games that are increasingly coming out. You know, it's not just, you know, the S&K King of Fighters games that, that arcade archive originally dealt with. It's, it's much more esoteric stuff. So, you know, I would just say the idea of, appreciating classic games and revisiting classic games is just, you know, it just constantly becomes more and more mainstream and becomes easier and easier to do. And, you know, as long as that

continues to be the case, like I, I just see retronauts having relevance and having a purpose. And so, you know, that makes me happy. Not only as someone who likes and cares about games preservation and wants old games to be available, you know, even if they're kind of bad or weird. Actually, maybe especially if they're bad or weird. I just, you know, I'm just happy that, you know, I'm not alone in liking old games, which, you know, when I first started in the Games Press, that kind of felt like I was standing by myself in a room saying, hey, old video games are good just because it's not ES2 polygons still worth playing. I don't have to do that anymore. Like everyone, I feel

like everyone knows everyone's kind of come around and said oh yeah yeah actually pixels are good even if it's because they're like 10 years old and they grew up playing minecraft and they're like oh yeah super mario he looks like minecraft because he's all blocky you know totally valid or any any indie two-d game with pixel arts So I want to talk about the future, as much as we know about the future anyway. So what's happening with us is, yes, of course, COVID-19 happened. During the pandemic, everything became remote. We've been doing everything remotely for the most part.

And that just became the standard for podcasts. So everyone is used to a remote podcast now. And a lot of people have just stayed remote. We are now doing in-person recordings. I was not the first one because I was leaving for Canada the next day. And I needed to take a COVID test. And I was being very, very cautious. But I'll be at the next one in early December.

And we're going to be transitioning back into those, not as the main way to record podcasts, but we're going to get a lot knocked out in those weekends. And for me, at least, I'll be going back and forth between remote recordings and also in-person recordings. And in terms of life stuff, Jeremy, people probably know this about you, Jeremy, but you were living in the Bay Area until 2013. Then you moved to North Carolina. And you've been doing Retronauts for the most part remotely, independently, or for the most part, you've lived outside of the Bay Area, rather, doing this part of Retronauts. Yes, it was very exciting. You know, we put together this Kickstarter predicated on the idea that the three of us, you, me, and Ray, were all going to be able to get together like every weekend and record.

It was going to be very convenient and easy. And then, I don't know, within weeks of the Kickstarter closing out, I think, maybe it was like a month or two. Our landlord was like, hey, yeah, actually, I'm moving into this apartment and I need you to leave. And we looked around and because my wife had been living in that apartment for nearly 10 years and had, you know, kind of like 2005 rent kind of locked in. you know, San Francisco, you can only raise rent like 3% a year. So, you know, she had this like crazy low rate locked in in 2013. You know, we looked around and there was no way we could afford what we were paying for, you know, and get anything comparable within the city or within the area, really.

And, you know, I had just left a full-time job at IGN with benefits to take a contract job at US Gamer to help launch that. site without benefits which was not the easiest decision to make because I basically like when you count benefits gave up half my salary but I was like well you know like I know what rent is and it's going to be okay and then all of a sudden you know this this other factor came in and we lost our apartment so you know at that point we were like well got to leave so you know before I think no it was it was not quite before the show started but but soon after within three months of the show kicking off with Kickstarter. We relocated to North Carolina and had to kind of figure it out from there.

But, you know, that's been eight years, more than eight years. And it's still managed to work out. Yeah. And even though you've had to record remotely since then, I think we've all gotten a lot better at it. I mean, in person is ideal, but it can't always happen. And so as for me, the reason I brought that up, Jeremy, is because my personal news is I got married at the beginning of 2021, the worst time of the pandemic. We had a wedding planned for April of 2020, but then the pandemic happened. We all know the story.

And, of course, my wife is Nina Matsumoto. She's been on the show. She did our new logo even, has done art for us in the past. In my personal news, as people already know this, but I'm going to be moving to Canada at some point, probably in 2022. But as far as how this will all work, none of that will change. I mean, Jeremy was able to make it work, and I will be able to make it work too, especially with all the remote podcasting we've been doing. It just feels like the default now.

And I assume that we'll all be gathering again in the Bay Area to do in-person things as normal. And I don't think any of that will change. I'll have to fly in probably more often than I plan on doing. But other than that, I don't see anything being different about how we do this. And maybe I'll get Canadian guests. Who knows? Whoa, that'd be wild. Yeah, they play video games too.

They make a lot of them. Yes, besides Nadia. Nadia lives in, is going to be living in Toronto. I'll be in Vancouver. She's on the other side of the country. It's like the equivalent of, yeah, from Vancouver to Toronto's like San Francisco to Rale. Yeah, but quite a gap. But yeah, that's my own life experience.

It's, by the way, it's a very long, complicated process to move to Canada, even if you have a wife there. So it's not easy, but we've been making it work. And, yeah, and we'll be doing more conventions. After, as the time you're hearing this, Jeremy will have already went to Midwest Gaming Classic. I am, I'm staying behind for this one because I don't feel quite as safe taking a few within the country flights, especially because I have to have a clear COVID test to see my wife in Canada for the holidays. but I assume I'll be it the next one that happens. And Jeremy, do you have anything else more to say about conventions and how you think those will be going for the future?

I mean, I'm kind of taking it one at a time. I was able to get my COVID booster before, like, you know, it was sufficient time before Midwest Gaming Classic that I feel comfortable going. I'm going to try to avoid being on the show floor, you know, all that much. I will definitely be wearing masks everywhere I go, dupl you know plural masks but you know um i i still feel okay like they have a mask mandates in place vaccine mandates so it's you know it seems like a pretty a pretty good sort of test scenario

for seeing how this goes but if it does work out then yeah i would like to continue going to conventions you know other countries have made life during the pandemic work before they had vaccinations You know, that wasn't something available outside the U.S. nearly as readily, especially in Asia. And yet, you know, public life in South Korea and Japan have been pretty normal. And, you know, when they've had emergency COVID outbreaks, the numbers have been much lower here. So, you know, I'm very cautious, very, you know, taking a lot of care with my health and my family's health. But also at the same time, like, I do believe that, you know, if people are responsible, which is kind of a big if, but, you know, if I'm cautious and pay attention to where I'm going

and, you know, how I'm in public, I think it's possible to still have, you know, a fairly normal way of doing things despite the pandemic. And so, yeah, there's a lot of question about being, you know, personal responsibility and things like that. But I am a believer in, in the fact that or the idea that, you know, it's possible to to make these things work and still be safe. And so I'm definitely doing, you know, Midwest Gaming Classic next weekend from this recording. I think the next MGC will be in April. So I hope to go to that. I got a solicitation recently about Long Island Retro Expo, which has grown into a really great show. And I'm looking forward to going back to that. So definitely be presenting there next summer. And beyond that, I don't

know. It just kind of depends on what comes up. Hopefully Portland will happen. Yeah. That'll be, you know, the trifecta of great classic shows for me. The pandemic happened just as I started doing a ton of live shows, both the retronauts and my other podcasts. And just as I thought, like, I'm getting really good at this. And then suddenly I'm going to feel so rusty. But I missed a lot of things about life before the pandemic. What I really miss is conventions. They were such a regular thing for me, especially Portland. It sucks so bad that I've missed Portland for two years now. And I love going there. just for the city itself and for Portland Metro Gaming Expo, which is my favorite expo of the year. I just love it. I get to see my friends Gary and Cole and a lot of other people, but it's been a no-go for two years. So I'm hoping it feels like it should happen this year unless there's like a fifth or sixth wave. Who knows? But I really want Portland to happen. And I want to see everybody again at like multiple conventions a year. I was traveling so much in 2019. It ended so abruptly. Yeah, it was, it was tough last year to kind of get used to that. There was definitely a period of just me kind of moping around the house because I literally couldn't go anywhere

else. But, you know, I got over it and kind of found a good rhythm. But now that, you know, there's some opportunity to travel again, I've been enjoying that. And, you know, I kind of tested the waters a little bit for personal reasons, family reasons with my in-laws moving from D.C. down here, we had to fly up there a few times. So that was kind of a very short direct flight where we could have a lot of control over the situation and just say like do we feel safe doing this and yeah I haven't had any alarming experiences in any airport yet even in even in Houston where I seem to connect a lot just because it's in Texas doesn't mean that everyone there is like you know completely off their nut it's just you know the loud people are and they don't

they don't get to go into the airport yeah you have to take off your mask to be loud and once you do you're out of there I will last thing I'll say is this is just like slightly political, but when it comes to flying, when I have to go to Canada, I have to show my vaccine card and I have to have a test taken within 72 hours. That might seem excessive, but I would feel so much safer if that was the case with domestic flights. I would fly anywhere, but now I feel kind of sketchy about it still, even though numbers are dropping as of this recording, let's hope to keep dropping. I'm really hoping for the best. I hope we get out of this in 2022, and things can go back to semi-normal for sure.

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And this holiday season, give the coffee lover in your life the gift of better coffee, too, with their own personalized gift coffee subscription from trade. Enjoy. Okay, let's move on to listener mail, I asked you to write in about retronauts and your questions and comments. I heavily curated these, so we might even. read only a little bit of your comment, but I got the core of what you're saying in your little comment there. So I want to start with Adam, who says, cheers to 15 years, long-time listener here. I think it would be interesting to hear you all reflect a bit on a few of the future

predictions you made in the past. Now that we're in the future, do you feel the same? As we continue to look through the horizon, do you have any new ideas? Now, Jeremy, I think you're famous on this podcast for having predicted things or at least having podcasted about things. And then they suddenly became available. I think that happened to me recently with one of my podcasts where I released the podcast and like a remake came out the next day or the re-release came out the next day. I forget which one it was. That sounds right and I'm totally blinking on it. Yeah, that does happen a lot. It's not really so much a prediction. It's like, oh, I'm going to cover a topic and then some weird thing happens. And it's all totally like blinking out of my memory right now. It happens so often.

I can't remember any of them. I mean, I know. I know. I think for me it was. the chokobo episode i released that and then i think the next day or maybe the same day square announced the reboot of chokobo racing yes but uh yeah the second part of the uh the question here do you um do you have any new ideas uh in terms of just you know the show itself and i think um people might assume like oh once you cover all of these games there's really nothing we'll have to talk about for me my own stance is that uh as the the line advances for what becomes retro there are new things to talk about and also just looking over I just like skim through all 600 posts or whatever just the titles and I'm thinking there's so many things that we haven't covered and so many things that we can cover again now that we can dive down deeper or cover one game at a time or cover one error of a series at a time that I think there is no shortage and especially now that we have new hosts they have their own special specialty they have their own expertise and they have a lot of knowledge about topics that we don't know and yeah I feel like there's no shortage There's no danger of running out of ideas for retronauts for sure.

Yeah, I mean, at any given point, I have just kind of like this floating slush list of topics I'd like to cover. And I actually have my topics planned out through the end of 2022 already. You know, and those are obviously subject to change. They'll get shifted around and rescheduled and so on and so forth, just as kind of circumstances dictate. But, you know, there's a lot of new topics in there. One thing I want to start next year is a deep. dive series into the Shin-Magamei Tense series. You know, like I said, we recently started a Pokemon deep dive series.

I'm sure there are, you know, non-RPGs that we can also talk about. But, you know, that's one of the many things I want to discuss. Yeah, there's just, there's never a shortage of topics. And, you know, I know that, you know, even if we keep going for another 15 years, I still won't be able to talk about all the stuff that I want to talk about. And, you know, we do sometimes go back and revisit familiar subjects or revisit a topic, but that's just because we have new things to say about them, new perspectives. I feel that when we've gone back and talked about, you know, we just recently,

in the same weekend that I recorded the Pokemon episodes, talked about Metal Gear Solid 2. I think that episode is due out imminently. Did it come out? No, it hasn't come out yet. But, you know, we've talked about that game before. But this episode was a wholly new conversation, wholly new perspectives,

and, you know, an interesting conversation in its own right. So, yeah, there's, there's, you know, a great game. There's plenty to say about it. You know, there are podcasts that exist entirely around a single game, you know, sustained for months and months years. So certainly there's enough space for us to have, you know, three hours of conversation about a game

instead of an hour and a half. Definitely. Another Adam says, congrats on the anniversary. One question I'd like to ask if Bob and Jeremy were given the opportunity to work on any gaming series

as in inputting ideas and influencing the direction of the game, what would it be? Bob, go forward. I'm going to say, I don't want to work on a game ever because it's a lot of responsibility and that's not my skill set,

but if I had a chance to just tell people what to do, I would, because now that Zelda, Legend of Zelda series is getting very experimental they're, you know, not afraid to break the formula. I say, let's revisit the Majors Mask idea because people are very happy with that game.

People now look back fondly on it and people love rogue likes more than ever. They're very comfortable with the idea of restarting the experience while retaining some things. I say now is the perfect time to retread that idea given more than 18 months of development time. And I think that would be an amazing experience. And who knows, maybe the new Zelda will have some of those elements.

I don't know yet. We don't know. I would have said Harvest Moon before Star Dew Valley came out but Starry Valley basically made Harvest Moon irrelevant. I hate to be mean but they kind of did and if I would have you know

forged a new direction of Harvest Moon I would have said make it like Friends of Mineral Town but much better that's what Starry Valley did. My other comment would be I would join Mario sports teams and make them back into RPGs again because they kind of do that but they don't really do it in the way that they used to and I want to see

them going back to making a good Camelot RPG with a golf or tennis experience buried within it. Yeah, Mario RPGs or Mario sports games were the only good Camelot RPGs, and it's a shame that's been taken away from us. Outside of Shining Force, they made those pretty good. Yeah, but those were vintage Camelot. Yeah. Okay, sure.

Man, I don't know that there's any current series that I feel I have strong enough ideas to say, oh, no, I need to put my fingerprint on this. but obviously I would love to be given reins for a Goonies 3 and put jet packs in it obviously that would be a great idea I would also be okay with Nintendo saying

hey we need another Wario Land game can you help us with that and I would say yes and then I would hire a lot of really talented people who aren't me to come up with really crazy ideas and that would be my job is just like the guy who gets paid to sit in office and say hey you do something

really weird. Nothing is out of bounds as long as it's not obscene. Just go for it. And, you know, we can have different standards of obscenities. So as long as it's not too obscene. Well, if you make Goonies 3... That would be okay. If you make Goonies 3 in the next three years,

you can get to the 40th anniversary of the movie. And then that'd be a great to re-release with the 8K Blu-ray or whatever. You can have your Goonies 3 video game. So let's write the Konami together. Okay. Yes. All right. So we have Anders or Anders,

is up next who says, I drifted from JRP's for quite some time before playing Shin Megamintense 4 in college and having a sort of aha moment where I remembered why I love the genre in the first place. I wonder if there was a gamer series that helped reinvigorate your love of a particular genre. And I take it this is meant to be like things we played for retronauts. And my greatest memory of this is when we first started the podcast or restarted independently. And I didn't really ever give Wario Land to a chance because I love three so much. And playing that for the show was a great eye-opening experience because I did get the 100% on that game. And it's pretty substantial if you do that. So that's the one game I can

think of where I really gave it a second chance thanks to Retronauts. And it became one of my favorite games. And in recent memory, I think the RPG Live Alive, thanks to Victor Hunter, I did an episode about that. I never gave it a chance because it's easy to sit down and dabble in each of the seven chapters and then move on with your life. But this time, I basically played through 95% of the game and it was it's pretty flawed there's some you know unfair and badly made stuff in there but I feel like I would not have that experience for if not for this podcast and I do appreciate that experience because it was so unique yeah I would say um maybe not a series but a genre is golf video games as as you know just being sports games and being someone who has zero

interest in sports in real life, I just never really gave them much thought. And when I did dabble and, you know, like pick up a golf game, I'd be like, eh, no thanks. But, you know, somewhat for Retronauts also for my videos, I've had to spend time with golf games and have really come to appreciate that there are some great golf video games. And it's a really satisfying, appealing genre when it's made by a good developer. And I would consider the good developers really to be T&E Soft, Hal, and, you know, I haven't really played that many Mario Golf games, not really spent that much time with them,

but I'm willing to give Camelot the benefit of a doubt when it comes to Mario Golf. But, yeah, like, that's a genre that I didn't expect to enjoy, but they've kind of come around on thanks to, you know, covering them in retrospectives. Those are the only sports games I like because they're just about stopping a series of meters. Pretty much, yeah. And the accuracy that comes down to that. I would say on the flip side, doing this show, it's been interesting seeing the rough edges on games. I formerly thought were kind of flawless.

I've been doing the Lucas Art series. In returning to a few of those, I can respect what they're doing, but a few of them I'm thinking, oh, this is not as intuitive as I thought it was, which is why I'm putting off doing Grim Fendango. Everyone loves it. I have my difficulties with that game. If you're wondering where that episode is, it's coming. but I'm going to break everyone's heart with my podcast. Yeah, I had a similar experience with Super Castlevania 4,

which I covered effusively in a retronauts micro several years ago, just kind of off the cuff from memory playing like the first few stages. And then I revisited it in its entirety for video and was like, oh, actually this game has a lot of problems that I really had never noticed before. But now that I revisit it with a critical eye, yeah, it could be better. Alan says, my question, you could have a no question. off-limits to our interview with anyone from the games industry alive or dead, who would you pick and why?

I have a few things written down ahead of time for this because I know exactly who I want to talk to, and that is Shu Takumi, the Ace Attorney Creator, because Ace Attorney Games were coming out while I was in the press. Every time they came out, I would ask Capcom, can I interview this guy? And they would say he's not giving interviews now. He never gave interviews outside of coming over here to promote Ghost Trick. And nobody cared about talking to him. But I cared.

I never got an interview with him. And I never was able to. I feel like I never will talk to him. So he's the guy I want because I thought it was possible to get an interview with him. A guy that I never thought was possible to interview is Takashi Tezika. I feel like everyone interviews Miyamoto. He's interviewed so many times you can read a thousand interviews with him. And they're always good.

He's great. But I feel like Tezica, he was on the ground floor for all those important games with Miyamoto. People aren't talking to him enough while he's still alive. And I feel like there are so many stories that have yet to be told by him. and he seems a little more humble he's not thrown in the spotlight as much but I feel like he is just as important as Miyamoto in terms of the creation of so many

important games. For me this is a really easy one without question Gunpeyokoi. A man who was so influential in so many respects in terms of video game design, in terms of hardware design and who passed away

way too young, more than almost 25 years ago. You know, I feel like we were really robbed in a lot of ways by by his death you know obviously his death itself was a tragedy but also he had just left Nintendo you know kind of getting out from that that sort of sheltering cover up you know what do you call like the kind of walled garden of Nintendo where you can't really get access to those people sure that's one way but also because he passed just before video game coverage, you know, journalism and content really went online. And so there are very

few video profiles of him. There's like one interview with him by I think a Mexican or Brazilian video magazine that you can find like clips of online. That's, that's pretty much it. And he had, I'm sure, so much to say about his design process and, you know, just how to make video games and how to make fun, interesting gadgets and how to create fun and entertainment out of seemingly, you know, useless scraps of technology, as he often did. Yeah, I would love to sit down with him for two hours and just say, like, please tell me everything. On the flip side of that, I did get a dream interview, and I've mentioned this before. I talked to Hiro nobu Sakaguchi when I was a US gamer, but I was about his mobile game. And I could only talk

about that, I was allowed one Final Fantasy question. It was very heartbreaking because he was right there, he was next to me, but I had to talk about this game that was, I guess, was popular, but I didn't care about it. I was just there for him. So, that was a little heartbreaking for me. So, moving on,

So moving on, Sean says, what's the most memorable reaction you've had upon answering, Hey, Jeremy or Bob, what do you do for a little? living since you've been fully independent um i think actually so uh when we talk to gary and cole maybe like three or four years ago we had a podcast about what we do for a living and how people they don't know how to answer uh they usually just don't respond when you tell them you're a podcaster but i think in the past few years i think most people now know what a podcast is they understand what a podcast is due to uh certain things some of them unfortunate like the popularity of joe rogan that has let people know what a podcast is the

the rise of Q&I, but also big things like our heart radio, they're getting into podcasting in a big way, they're just becoming more of a commonplace kind of media like Will Therrell has a podcast network now, celebrities are doing it. I feel like now when you tell people you have a podcast, they understand the idea. The thing is, they might not understand why you're doing it because they just think famous people have podcasts. They might think you're, oh, you're unemployed. You're just having fun while you're unemployed, right? So I think the thing I have problems telling people or letting them know or getting through to them about is that I do this for a living

and I make like a living doing this. I think that's harder to communicate than I have a podcast. Yeah, I mean, I think the hardest part for me has always been just saying like I do X thing about video games. I'm trying to make them understand that doesn't mean I make video games. That was like I write about video games. Oh, you like write the scripts? No, no.

And you know, even now I work at limited run games. But if I tell someone locally that I, you know, know, work at a games publisher, they're like, oh, you work at Epic, you make Fortnite? No, I don't. So, yeah, it's just, you know, a lot of information. It's, it's, it's fine. It's just, you know, people don't need to understand what I do. As long as there are people who understand and get it, that's great.

That's, you know, kind of what we're here for. I'm usually happy when the conversation ends because then I have to answer all of these questions. Do you ever talk about podcasting with people, strangers, or does your main, you get come first, usually with, you know, what do you do? These days, it's easier to just say I work at a, you know, a company that publishes video games. But, you know, if they really dig deep, then sure, like I'll talk about podcasting, making videos, books, whatever. Like, you know, I do a lot of stuff. So it depends on how interested they seem.

If they, they kind of glaze over at the first mention of video games, I'm like, yeah, it's fine. I guess if you look at the person, you can say, here's what my answer will be. Normally, when I had a website job, if I saw the person, and I assume they would know nothing about games. gaming or the internet, I just would say, oh, I work at a website. And that would be the end of the conversation. Yeah, Tyler says, what has it been like marketing retronauts over the years? Did people just naturally follow the show from its one-up days? Or have you had to work hard to build an audience? How will you continue to grow your audience in the future? I guess I should start with this since I was in the one-up days. You were there.

My answer is I'm terrible at marketing. I basically don't do anything aside from like say, hey, on Twitter. Hey, there's a new episode. Yeah, I'm not good at self-promotion. So thankfully, we have folks like Diamond. Yes. Who runs the Twitter account and does an amazing job so much better than I ever could have. Really appreciate the work they do. And yeah, I feel like it's mostly been organic growth. People, you know, get word of mouth. And, you know, to me, something that's very important is to interact with people who enjoy the show. And, you know, as long as they're not being like total dirtbags about it, you know, whether it's praise or criticism, you know, try to take it fairly. But, you know, just don't be unapproachable. Don't be snooty, I guess. Like, yeah,

we're creating a thing that you listen to. That's, that's never been the attitude. I'm always, you know, always really happy to meet people who listen to the show and always kind of surprised, you know, when people are like, oh, I love retronauts. That always still makes me say, oh, you do. Oh, that's great. Thanks. So, yeah, that's one thing I miss about conventions is just getting out there and meeting people who listen to the show and, you know, talking to them about their favorite games,

what they like about the show, what they'd love to hear us talk about, you know, their own takes on things. So, you know, I'm really looking forward to a Midwest Gaming Classic next week. And maybe I'll do some organic marketing there by talking to people who listen to the show. I don't know. Hand out bumper stickers or something. Pamphlets. Yeah, I think the unspoken thing is we definitely benefit a lot from having been on one-up. It was a medium-sized website back when websites were very relevant in the last era, which they were really relevant, when there were a lot of them instead of just the main ones, the oldest ones are the ones that stuck around. And I feel like that gave us a major boost. Without that existing platform, it would be much, much harder to

grow, although starting a podcast that early definitely helped a lot. And I think, that I don't know if I'm good at social media, but I do it a lot because I need to promote myself to survive. So I'm doing it a lot. Hopefully I'm not being too annoying. But if I make something, I want people to see it because that's what's important to me. I'm not just making it for myself. And I feel like, yeah, Diamond has been a great help in taking advantage of the social media, being very savvy about that, knowing how to promote things. And something that still surprises me. And it happened today is that people from the olden days, people that one-up listeners are still finding out

that we came back. There was one new person on that episode posted today saying, I loved your show in 2010, 2011, and I just realized you guys are back and I signed up for the Patreon. It's still cool to know that you can listen to a podcast and 10 years later rediscover it and realize, oh, I have to

listen to 600 new episodes. That's awesome. So yeah, I'm honestly still surprised that I have not been screaming loud enough for people to realize retronauts still exist. But yeah, like I assume after one-up die, people just assume that we all just I don't know, became door-to-door salesman or something. I don't know what happened there.

But yes, I'm honestly still surprised that people are still finding out of us. So I will just be louder and more annoying online about retronauts. That's my vow to all of you. Good plan. Bill says, which creative team do you wish was more prolific or would reunite for another project? Thanks for so many years and great shows. This is going back to my who would you interview question. But it's related to Takashi Tesika.

my thoughts would be get the 2D Mario team back together for one last hurrah. No, the new Super Mario Brothers games do not count. Make them make their own thing together in the old style because going back in 2017

and playing Thimbleweed Park which is Ron Gilbert saying I'm going to make a adventure game with the hindsight of today but with the technology of the past that was such a cool experience and I want to see every older dev try to do that at least once

before they retire. I think it's a really great experience for them to have and I think what comes out of it is very valuable for the player as well. And that is my own very selfish demand of the Mario team. Get back together. One more 2D Mario game.

I would love to see the Mega Man Legends team get back together, the ones responsible for the PlayStation games, get green light on Mega Man Legends 3, make a new game, unbeholden by that horrible social media experiment Capcom did. Just, you know, tell us how the hell Mega Man gets off the moon, bring that same sort of a few joyful video game style 3D action like bring it back you know give us they they I think technology now could you know kind of bring forward that simplistic anime look and spruce it up with effects and things like that better texturing but not not overcomplicated like still make it look like a cartoon that would be that would be delightful I would love it hopefully

somebody will make a spiritual sequel in some point in the future that's not red ash we're getting that. Moving on to Tim. Tim has a question for us. Tim says, What game did you have no experience with when it was released? But you checked out because you'd be doing an episode on it and then fell in love with it. Which came at the time that when you revisited for an episode,

you realized it would have been better as a memory. And I couldn't think of any things that I fell in love with upon playing it for the first time for the show. For me, it was a lot of reaffirming things I liked remembering, yes, these are very good. like things, especially revisiting things like Demon Souls before we knew a remake was coming, Resident Evil 4, and Batman Arkham Asylum, just going and thinking, yeah, these are good. And then coming out the other end saying, oh, no, these are some of the best games of all time. These are spoken of such high praise for a reason. Yeah, I kind of feel like this overlaps a lot with the previous question where I said golf.

I can't really think of anything where I just went into it totally sight unseen and said, oh, this is amazing in ways I never would have anticipated. But, you know, like I said, I did develop an appreciation for golf games, thanks to Retronauts. So I guess that's it. Another example I have is, you know, sometimes I don't want to turn everything in my life into homework. And a new game I experienced for the first time, a new old game was the Famicom Detective Club games. I played both of those re-releases this year. And I was like, oh, I've never played these before. I knew so little about them and I love both of them. But I also

just kind of want to enjoy them on my own terms from now and not turn them into homework for an episode. So maybe in the future there will be one about that series, but that was something I experienced that was old for the first time and I really, really ended up enjoying them. Andrew says, what unreleased retro game and what untranslated retro game

do you most wish had gotten a release? It should be easy to read my mind on this. Mother 3, and we must continue hounding Doug Bowser before he deletes the source code. I think it's going to happen. If Reggie Fisema did not delete the source code upon his exit, Doug

Bowser is just dangling it over a shredder as we speak. So that is something I think, if Nintendo fails enough with their next console, and they probably won't, they will give us Mother 3. That's the reason why we got Earthbound and Earthbound beginnings on WiiU virtual console is because Nintendo was just

like, we'll give you whatever you want, just please, buy the Wii U. Other than that, I think other things that were not translated for US, the Rocket Slime games that are not the DS one, the advanced one, and the 3DS one. I think those have fan translations now,

but those are never released in English officially. And also something that I know for sure was translated by fans was the second Miles Edgeworth game. It was a 2011 DS game, so of course it was not going to come out here in any way. So, yeah, those are all the ones that I want to have official releases of at some point in the future. Yeah, I mean, Mother 3 is the first thing that came to mind for me as well.

You know, there was supposedly a Crystallus 2 in development by S&K for Neo Geo. I don't know what that would have been like. How do you take an action RPG and turn it into a Neo Geo game that has to work both for the AES and MVS? I don't know, but I would love to have seen that game have happened. But it did not. And now I will never know how it would have worked. I guess for this, I don't consider Japanese a big stumbling block anymore. Even though I know very little, I'm cheating in that my wife is fluent because it's her first language. So to a point, I can kind of ask her, what does that say for almost anything? I don't think she would sit behind me and let me play an RPG while translating every line that might be pushing things a bit too far. But now I can actually have access to someone who knows who can just on the spot translate something for me and it's very, very handy. And I appreciate that she does not get annoyed because I ask her to do it a lot, especially for this show, by the way. So I give her a lot of credit for translating things that I don't know what they say. So Brandon says, when did you realize video games could be

bad? And for me, it happened very young in life. In fact, I recorded an episode. episode about this for Gary and Cole's Abject Suffering podcast on DuckFeed. TV. I was at the Toys R Us. I could pick out any game I wanted. I was very young, not reading magazines yet. I did not know what was good. So my mom saw Spy versus Spy and she said, oh, I love Mad Magazine. I think I was reading at the time. She loved Spy versus Spy, so I got it. And not knowing that was like a 1984 computer game that was ported to the NES for a 1988 or 1989 release. Not a good game, not really made for a single player NES experience, just rotten music, very sparse and bad graphics. And at that point, I realized like, oh, games can be bad.

And I spent my mom's money on this or it was a birthday present or something. I forget what the transaction was. But at that moment, I realized the world was not so innocent when I played Spy versus Spy for the NES. Yeah, I don't know exactly when I realized games could be bad. But, you know, I am old enough that I played a lot of arcade games back in the golden age of arcade games. And let me tell you, not all of those games were gold. And that was a very sort of low impact way to discover games are bad because you would put a quarter in and have a miserable time and say, oh, that's not very good. And, you know, I was very fortunate.

I don't remember buying any NES games when I got an NES and had a very limited allowance that, made me say, wow, that was an absolute turn. What a stinker. But I definitely borrowed games from friends where I was like, whoa, this game is not good and I don't like it. You know, stuff like TNC surf design or Ikari Warriors, things like that. Like I borrowed those from friends. So they kind of took the lumps for me. And I didn't have to spend my very limited allowance on being deeply disappointed and trying to make the best of a rotten piece of crap. So yeah, I don't know.

I was just kind of always in the background for me. Like, hey, there is the real danger that you could spend money and buy something terrible and not be able to buy anything good instead. So be careful. Yeah, I think, thank God for Nintendo power, right? With a rental, I could convince myself, oh, no, I'm just not good at this. It's my fault. It's not the game. It's not the game. But with it stuck with a game like Spy versus Spy, I had to live with the fact that it was bad and it

was just in my house, and I had to play it because there was really nothing else going on. Sam says, what was your first attempt at games writing? Did you keep a journal? Were you scared to freely express an interest in gaming? I think this is directly related to you, Jeremy, at least my story, because before I started writing my video games, I was reviewing anime for our website and anime DVDs. So I think a few months after that, you were taking submissions for your Toasty Frog zine, and I wrote for a few of those. So I think technically that's the first time I actually did video game writing and would continue to do it from that point. As for, were you scared to express interest in gaming?

By the time I started writing about games, I was out of high school, so I didn't care what anyone thought of me at that point. But I do remember in the 90s when I was in high school, I graduated in 2000. It was not cool to play games. People weren't talking about games. And I had very few game playing friends. A lot of people, quote unquote, grew out of it. And I think one of the things about younger people is the idea that you stop playing games

in a certain age is no longer the de facto rule. I think a lot of people my age thought that and probably still do. But now people just kind of game for life and it's understood, yeah, like people that are 50 years old are gaming, people that are 60 years older gaming. It's totally natural. So after I got out of high school and away from peers, I was forced to interact with, I had no shame about my gamer lifestyle. Yeah, you know, back in like junior high when I was playing NES games, I was a little careful about who I talked to about the fact that I spent a lot of time playing video games. but I also had a lot of, you know, good, reliable nerd friends who were just as big into video games as me.

We traded NES games back and forth. So, you know, there was definitely like that peer support group. It's for my first attempt at writing about games. I don't know that it really occurred to me to write about video games. You know, I was on the student newspaper in high school and constantly wrote like letters to friends and things like that. but you know what the first time i remember writing about video games was after i launched my very first personal website in 1996 and i didn't immediately write about video games there it was all like

anime and uh i think there might have been some music coverage maybe like something stupid about star wars and it was only maybe like a year later that i said oh i should i should maybe put some video game stuff on here i think it was um you know being involved in sort of the the message board community around I don't remember if it was the unofficial Squersoft homepage at the time or RP Gamer you know it was sometime around the time Final Fantasy 7 came out so that would be

about a year after my 1996 website launch I started talking on message boards and posting and then thinking oh like there's you know the site that the boards are attached to you know they have like letters to the editor they have fan editorials and stuff so I wrote some long-winded pompous editorials I think you know from there I was just like cool

I'm gonna keep doing this and just never stopped I would just wouldn't shut up yeah for me my final thing to say about this is I spent a lot of time in school to become a better writer like eight years in college and I found that the most rewarding things I was doing was writing about games which is why I got out of academia and into writing about games because I was having more fun

with it I was getting paid for it and people were responding to it more than you know paper on poems or something like that. So that's my final statement on that. So we're wrapping up, we're running out of time here. Let's do some lightning round, quick answers to these last questions. So Christopher says, besides travel, thanks, COVID, what do you find most challenging about producing restaurants?

I will say my number one thing is finding time to research everything, even though I am still kind of living by pandemic rules and have a lot more free time than normal. It's still hard to find time to do everything in a way that satisfies me, but I know people are happy with the episodes. Number two, I will say over the years, a lot of our guests, and we've gotten comments about this, but a lot of our guests have just become unavailable, either they don't want to be an online public presence, or they now have jobs in which they can no longer be on podcasts. We have a lot of old podcasting buddies that now work on Nintendo.

They have rules about that, and we wish we can get them on, but we can't. So especially when it comes to the Bay Area, I feel like on the last one left outside of maybe Kat and Ray, everyone is leaving this area too. So finding not only people who can still podcast, but local people especially, has been a challenge. And that's why COVID has been good for us in a few ways outside of all the bad things in which we've had to find new people just because of the remote issue and also more and more people can't podcast with us anymore. Yeah, for me, it's definitely getting together guests. And, you know, a lot of it is just the fact that I'm very reluctant to reach out to people I don't know and impose on them that way. So that's a big limitation for me.

Maybe it's just something I need to get the hell over. But it just seems so inappropriate for me to just be like, hey, you don't know me, but would you mind giving me two hours of your time? So, you know, kind of working around that limitation and kind of working up the courage to be like, I hope this person doesn't think I'm an asshole. That's always challenging. But, you know, I think we still manage to get by. I agree. James says, when will we get a Jaguar episode? And the answer is, I dropped out of math class and cannot do the math.

Yeah, it's, I mean, we're writers. We're not, we're podcasts. We're not mathematicians. So I love this to you, Jeremy, because I feel if anyone does this, it will be you probably, not me. I don't know why. It just felt like Jeremy feels like Jeremy would do a Jaguar episode. That's not an insult, by the way. No, I mean, I got to get some use out of that Jaguar that my friend found in the trash and gave to me.

Right. Then you can put it right back in its natural home when you're done. we kid because we love so Sean says what is the story behind Bob Mackey's hatred of CRT TVs I understand hating giant Trinitron but this extend to PVMs and smaller sets so my short answer is that for a long time in my 20s and 30s I had to you know move across the country constantly chasing work across the country not really having any kind of you know economic stability and along the way having to move a 32 inch Trinitron CRT TV that was was impossible to move just by myself in and out of all these very, very small spaces.

And I still live in a small space because I'm living in a space I moved into on a games journalist's budget. So I think at some point I'm going to turn 40 next year and I'm going to move to Canada in a bigger space. It'll be the first time I've lived in a non-bedroom or one-bedroom apartment for my entire adult life. And maybe then I will get a CRT TV. But until then, it's out of necessity that I don't do CRT TV gaming. And I will also say input lag has never ever bothered me, but I understand why it bothers other people. But that is my response. And I understand why people like them, but I just can't fit them in my house right now.

John says, how does the team feel about ROM hacks that add quality of life improvements to older games? For example, save support to Mega Man games, adding more info to the map in Super Metroid. Personally, I'm all in favor of that. I love to see, you know, I love classic games, but they, weren't always the most accessible and the friendliest. And, you know, I don't necessarily think that a game should be, you know, just completely reinvented. But I mean, if you want to do that, that's fine. That's your prerogative. But yeah, anything that makes classic games more accessible to anything that makes classic games more accessible to a broader audience. I mean, you see a lot

of collections that already have rewind and save states built in. So why not build that into the actual ROM itself. I think that's really cool. I love to see kind of new iterations of games. You know, some of the things like the SA1 hacks for super NES games where they, you know, basically put the games on a faster mapper chip. So things like Gratius 3 and Super Goals and Ghosts can run at full speed and you can realize, whoa, slowdown was really good. I can't play this anymore. It's too hard. Like those are really fun and interesting. I'm a big fan of those. Yeah, I'm like Frank Sefaldi and that I think no retro

re-release should come without a rewind feature. I like that even more than safe state. Just having it on one button, it's perfect and it feels less like cheating you know, to me at least. So Carl says, what topic would you want to discuss if you haven't already and another question is any stories

from the Zip Davis days that haven't been told? So my answer to the first question is Resident Evil, we did one episode covering, I think, the first four games and that was honestly too much. Maybe the first three I think was in that one episode. So honestly, I could do an episode per game and I think that could be my next miniseries after LucasArts has done. And my one experience was Zip Davis is they bought one up and then fired me. So that's all I have. And frankly, it wasn't

a very good experience. So you know what? I don't like Zip Davis. Yeah, I think maybe he meant the like the older version of Zip Davis before they were hollowed out into an empty shell by Avenger capitalists. So let's see. Are there any Zift Davis stories that I don't, that I haven't told before um you know nothing really comes to mind but that's kind of putting me on the spot um you know i retronauts was never the podcast where we got drunk around a pool so it was always it was always pretty buttoned down like you know scotcharchy was a regular Chris Kohler would come in to record with us we'd like all get together go to the studio record some stuff, you know, shoot the breeze, call today. We're very boring. We were like old people even

when we were young. It's terrible. So moving on, just a few more questions here before we wrap up. Josh says, any plans to review more old PC games? Specifically, I would like to hear a podcast about Arcanum. It's in my personal top five games of all time. And I will say, yes, I'm very interested in that. In fact, the LucasArts series is my attempt to get more PC game coverage on the show. I am also a PC gamer. I have been since 96. It's my performance. platform for games. So I love PC gaming. Unfortunately, a lot of the folks I know aren't as in the PC gaming as I am, especially the older stuff. So it's more a matter of me of finding new guests and finding new topics outside of LucasArts games. But I vow to you there will be more

PC game coverage on this podcast in the future. Another Adam says, I bought my brother a DE10 Nano after hearing the Smoke Monster episode and we've been living the Mr. Lifestyle ever since. It's been a great way to experience games and consoles we'd previously overlooked. Are there any aspects of retro gaming you would not have experienced were it not for doing the show? For myself, I would say not exactly doing the show, but tangentially doing all the video work that I do. I definitely would not have, you know, ever looked into using real hardware, getting into, you know, playing on CRTs, upscaling, things like that, you know, like really going for the accurate kind of original experience and rediscovering that if it weren't for, creating videos like I started making videos just on a really terrible handheld clone super nes and the results were awful and someone wrote in and was like here I'm going to give you some equipment to

make this better for you and because of that little little starter kit I was like oh yeah this is a more satisfying experience to play and also yields better results so basically you know the entire process of just trying to play games that feel the way I remember them playing was something that I probably would not have discovered without all the retronauts and ancillary work that I do. And I'm really grateful that I did discover that, even though it's been, you know, expensive. There was a long time where I was really kind of burned out on classic games and really frustrated because I, you know, bought like a twin Famicom, you know, the really cool, sharp made family computer.

system that has an NES or Famicom slot and the disk system slot built in. And I bought that. I was so excited about it. I got dokey, dokey panic. And I got Acumajo Dracula. And I sat down and plugged it into my hotel in Japan to like this LCD flat panel TV and just had an awful experience. And I hated it. And I thought, wow, I guess I just don't like old video games anymore. And I didn't understand about display lag. And I didn't understand about upscaling lag and things like that. Like that was just not something that was, you know, in common parlance in 2008 or 2009 whenever it was. And while I was like, yeah, these are still cool games, but I guess I just outgrew them. I guess I just don't enjoy them anymore. I don't know. There's just something I don't

remember these, this is not as good as I remember it being. But, you know, once I kind of had that, that cataract vision and the slowdown taken away from me and just went back to playing games on, you know a CRT from from hardware or clone hardware I don't want to sound pretentious about it it's I'm not snooty I'm not like saying everyone should play it that way it's just for me like that was that was kind of the missing factor to make me realize oh yeah like these games were designed for this technology and when I play it there you know the game may not be very good but at least I know it's me who's you know like screwing up when I die in the game not because it's like fuzzy and slow and everything's running behind how it's supposed to

so yeah i would i would kind of say maybe this gets a little bit away from the original question but that's they kind of re-sparked an interest and enthusiasm in old games and consoles for me yeah as for me uh i don't bring these things to my apartment or house uh just because i don't have room and budget and things but i i did love going to the retro conventions and i can't wait to go back because it was my chance to experience you know all the arcade games all the pinball games especially and especially going to portland visiting both ground control and quarter world multiple times when I'm there, just playing all of these old games. It's fun to go to them and have those experiences because, again, I'm waiting until I have

more space to collect some more things, but I just loved seeing them, the arcade games, and I rememberabilia, and everything at those conventions. I can't wait to go back. So let's do one more question each, Jeremy, and I will take one from Colbin, who says, what's the worst setup slash location you have to deal with for recording a retronauts? Alternatively, what's the best or most luxurious? I don't think anything stands out as particularly bad or good. I will say some of the ones I did not enjoy in terms of just comforts were I did a few where it was like,

let's find a quiet hallway 83 and just sit on the floor. I mean, they were fine, people enjoyed them, but I just didn't feel comfortable. I can't think of like a luxurious one, although I am happy they stopped doing karate classes at Shared right after we started going there. When we started joining our new, our studio for the independent run, There was some conflicts there with some noisy karate folks, and also while we were there throughout, there was a Tong Ren class, and you could not disturb them once you had guests come in. So I was getting evil eye from some of those people, too. But other than that, I think it's been mostly okay.

Can you think of anything? I would say the worst setup we've had was that time we did the kind of side panel at Midwest Gaming Classic a few years ago about Hayanko Alien. And, you know, it was just like an experimental little thing. And we were standing in front of a speaker. I wanted to record it, but they didn't have anything set up. And it was just like you and me sharing a microphone, standing in front of a, like this crowd that could barely hear us. Yeah, that was that was not ideal. Actually, I was going to say one thing.

I saw one picture from that and it's you talking and me with my arms crossed. And I just thought, I didn't feel like I was pissed off, but I look incredibly mad. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was fun, but it was also very awkward. Yeah, yeah. Luxurious, man, I don't know. There, there was something kind of luxurious about recording with Alex Frioli. Yeah, yeah. Just the fact that we had like a retro gaming bar, excuse me, rental shop.

Yes, legally. To ourselves, like it was shut, like, you know, after hours, just us and there hanging out with him talking about Dragon Quest. That was, that was a really great experience. It just, you know, felt very kind of like, ah, yeah, this is the dream, like, traveling around. This is like Anthony Bourdain or something. This is great. Yeah, and there hasn't been nearly enough of that, in my opinion. I'm glad Alex still has been able to make that work out for him, too.

Even though he ran to a lot of difficulties with the Japanese government, he's still out there doing it, and I totally respect him for that. So, yeah, that's been our 15th anniversary celebration. I vow to you when year 20 comes, we will have an in-person thing. We have to. I assume we would have been doing it this year at Portland if, you know, that happened. We would have been celebrating there for sure. We will send 20 lucky fans gas masks to weather the 20, the 2026 pandemic so that you can come see us live. Yes, hopefully COVID won't be on its 40th mutation by then.

I'm very optimistic. I really want to see everybody again. And, you know, we have nothing but high hopes for the future for the world and for our podcast, especially. But yeah, thank you for listening to our 15th. anniversary celebration. We're sorry we couldn't get to every letter, but you guys wrote in a ton of great letters. I read them all and I appreciated everybody writing in. So thanks a lot for doing that. So more about Retronauts. You can find us on Twitter at Retronauts. And as I said up front, we talked about it a lot. We're a Patreon-supported show. If you want to support us, go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up for the $3 level, you get all the episodes one week at a time and at free. But if you want to sign up for five bucks a month, you get advanced episode access on top of access to two full-length bonus episodes every month and a weekly column and podcast. by Diamond Fight, and I will say that we started doing those bonus episodes at the beginning of 2020, the very beginning. So there are a ton of those that you have not heard if you are not on the $5 level. I think there's probably like 50 by now that are totally new to use.

You'll get access to those immediately upon signing up at patreon.com slash retrodance. Jeremy. Oh, where to find me? Yeah. I'm all over the internet, baby. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me on YouTube as Jeremy Parrish. You can find me making podcasts here at Retronauts. And you can find me at Limited RunGames.com, although I don't really post there that much. I'm doing all kinds of stuff in print and inside

the games and so on and so forth. Well, inside the game packages. Anyway, I do a lot of stuff, and I think most of it is pretty darn good. So I go check it out. And as for me, I am Bob Mac. You probably know that, but you can find me on Twitter. As Bob Servo, I do a lot of podcasts outside of Retronauts.

You can find those all in the Talking Simpsons network. Those are Talking Simpsons, a weekly chronological exploration of the Simpsons and what a cartoon where we look at a different cartoon from different series every week. You can find all those where you find podcasts or go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We have a similar $5 level over there with tons of bonus podcasts over 100. Right now we're right in the middle of our new podcast mini series. Blabin' About Batman the animated series. It's a 10 episode exploration of the best episodes of Batman the animated series. You can only get those behind the $5 paywall at patreon.com slash

Talking Simpsons. But that is it for us this week. We'll see you again. soon for another new episode of Retronauts. Thanks so much for listening. You know, ...tolde, ...you know, ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... Thank you.