Video Game History with Steven L Kent (Part Three)

Remember that you can always get in touch with us on our Facebook page, on Twitter, or with our Contact page. Don't forget to check the chapters tab in your podcatcher. This is a thing we're doing now, so keep an eye open for those.

Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Show Notes

This is part three - of four - of a conversation with author and video game historian Steven L Kent, and is a collaboration between ourselves and Zoom Platform. Whilst this is an audio episode, it was originally recorded as a pair of video interviews. What we've done is cut the two video interviews into four parts and will be releasing them as audio episodes. But if you'd rather watch the first two parts as a video you'll find it here.

Don't forget to check out the other parts of the conversation:

part onepart two

And all four parts of our interview with Steven can be found here.

Part Three of Four

In his own words, Steven describes his books as

My books are called "The Ultimate History of Video Games".

Volume 1 starts out with Abraham Lincoln and Bagatelle, and goes all the way to 2000 and sort of the collapse of the Dreamcast - or it's about to collapse, you can tell that it's faltering - PlayStation 2 has been announced and is just coming out, and Xbox has been announced.

Book two has some overlap, because there will be some people who read volume 2 without reading volume 1, so it's got a bunch of overlap. But what's interesting is that I thought I'd be able to go from 2000 to the present, but I only got to 2012. So volume three should come out around 2026.
- Steven L Kent

The One Pixel and Tomb Raider

We all agreed that parts of the first Tomb Raider trilogy are a little overhyped, and treated with rose-tinted action-platformer glasses.

Whilst these games were important for both UK-based games development and the Girl Power movement in the mid-90s, a mixture of a slightly sluggish control scheme, magic pixel-based jumps, and the outright sleaze of the Tomb Raider commercials have put us off of those early entries.

Books, Christmas Time, and PSPs

Jay was hoping that he could get volume 2 of Steven's book read over the Christmas period and take part in Jolabokaflod. This is where family members will buy each other books and chocolates as Christmas gifts, but exchange those gifts on Christmas Eve. People then read those books, drink the cocoa, and fall asleep all snuggly-buggly style.

So what Jay is saying, Squidge, is that my books put him to sleep
- Steven L Kent

Unfortunately, Jay didn't get to read volume 2 over the Christmas period. But this did spark a discussion on the PSP and one of Squidge's favourite titles for the handheld that could: Phantasy Star portable.

I genuinely believe that the PSP and the PSP Vita were amazing pieces of hardware
- Jay

And the discussion on PSP lead to an anecdote about the day that he had a candid discussion with the head of Square-Enix about the console, and a discussion of the Sega Nomad - the portable Mega Drive/Genesis device.

Community Questions

Shortly after the first episode was recorded, we reached out to you all - aka, the community - for questions that you would like to as Steven. And it seemed fair to devote one and a half episodes (this part and the next) to posing those questions to Steven.

And the first question came from friend of the show Andrew Dickinson:

Steven is lovely. Say "hi!" from me
- Andrew

to which Steven broke in with:

Hi Andrew!
- Steven L Kent

And his question continued:

And ask him where he thinks gaming is headed now. Is VR the next big thing? Are we headed for a console-less cloud?
- Andrew

Which is an amazing question to start off the questions. And it lead to a real discussion about the fact that the human brain isn't meant to deal with VR.

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, and some links to related things.

What have you been playing recently? Do you agree with the anonymous review that Chief read during this episode? What would you take with you to the Thunder Plains?

Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, leave a comment on the show notes or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:

Support us on Ko-FiOur Facebook pageUs on TwitterSteven on Penguin Random HouseThe Ultimate History of Video Games volume 1The Ultimate History of Video Games volume 2Zoom PlatformJolabokaflodFree GuyHull Immersive Visualisation Environment (HIVE)Our suggested titles from Zoom Platform's catalogue:Squidge:Cannon FodderD: The GameEvil GeniusJay:I.G.I. 2: Covert StrikePraetoriansOverlordOur conversations with Steven:Part One