Jeremy: Greetings, patrons. As you may be aware, we at the Retronauts Podcasting Concern take video game history very seriously. And, once again, we're taking steps to share with you the history of one of gaming's most important and enduring entities: Japanese studio Capcom. In the past, we've attempted to cover milestone companies in strictly chronological order, a blanket approach that jumped from title to title but often failed to give a real sense of how the creators' skills and ...
2025-05-26 11:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Last month an unprecedented amount of breaking news resulted in our longest community podcast ever. Today, without anything on par with a new console reveal, I present our second-longest community podcast ever. How did this happen? Don't ask me, I just work here.
Me, of course, is Diamond Feit and I am joined by Stuart Gipp (Google him). Thank you for indulging me in an unorthodox monthly question in April; I pr...
2025-05-25 11:00:13 +0000 UTC
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Hi Patrons, Diamond Feit here. I love having this gig where you spend money and I get to talk about video games that you might remember but in this case, I'm specifically talking about a video game that one of you asked me to remember on purpose. More specifically, Ryan Hoss requested a podcast about Perfect Dark, Rare's follow-up to the wildly successful GoldenEye 007.
Our conversation ran a b...
2025-05-19 11:00:13 +0000 UTC
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May 1985: The Viper is coming
by Diamond Feit
Despite what some legislators would have you believe, corporations are not people. Corporations cannot create; people create. We scribble, we tinker, we experiment. We err and flub and blunder until we get things right. Corporations can own the rights to our work but don't get it mixed up: Human beings, not companies,...
2025-05-18 11:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Jeremy: Good evening, friends. This episode constitutes the second of our Metroidvania Book Club ventures: the series where we talk about metroidvanias. Though no books are actually involved. Sorry about that.
Once again, our Book Club Crew returns, minus one. Chris Sims was out the weekend we recorded this, so you'll have to settle for a tetrafecta of myself, Nadia, Stuart, and Kate. It's OK! We have a special fifth guest this week: YOU, the Retronauts community. Or at least t...
2025-05-16 12:00:12 +0000 UTC
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Two Mario RPG brands launched at the dawn of the 21st century, and while Paper Mario had the more immediate gimmick, Mario & Luigi devoted itself to standard RPG mechanics dressed up in Mushroom Kingdom finery. Though the series burned bright in its early years, the back half saw a decline with undercooked sequels, unpopular remakes, and the seeming death of Mario & Luigi—the brand, not the characters. And now that it's back once again, we must ask ourselves: is Mario & Luigi wo...
2025-05-12 07:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Good news/bad news, folks: I'm all caught up with writing my columns after my recent illness but my voice is still far from 100%. Fortunately I met this guy outside 7-11 who volunteered to supply his voice as a substitute; all it took was writing out every word phonetically and six hours of non-stop direction. I couldn't figure out how to post multiple "episodes" at once so the attached mp3 contains two columns stapled together. I should be up for reading words aloud by next Sunday, thank...
2025-05-11 11:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Nadia: Here be dragons, dragons, and more dragons. It's time to talk about 1990's DragonStrike for the PC, which means it's also time to talk about the strange top-down NES adaptation of TSR's flight sim/combat game! This week, Dragon Highlord Nadia Oxford is joined by two fellow dragon enthusiasts: D&D computer game whiz William SRD and Retronauts' very own Greg Melo! This might be your first time hearing Greg's voice, but no doubt you recognize the epic covers he makes for so m...
2025-05-05 11:00:12 +0000 UTC
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The Muppets have been with us in some way for 70 years—yes, really—meaning Jim Henson's fuzzy, slightly demented puppet creations essentially grew up alongside the medium of video games. And while turning the Muppets' pun-based humor into an interactive experience went about as well as expected, there's a few notable adaptations that show just how much their creator would have thrived if he lived to see the go-go '90s. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and
2025-05-02 07:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Jeremy: So first of all, you need to understand that this episode was recorded nearly two months ago, and it was on the books to publish this week for much, much longer than that. Which is to say that the intro quip—a quote from a song about the chaotic nature of the U.S., recorded 30 years ago by King Crimson, a band named for the devil—was recorded with no possible way of knowing that this episode would arrive a few days after the Pope's funeral. It's one of those weird coincid...
2025-04-28 11:00:30 +0000 UTC
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I hope you've got no pressing engagements for the next 150 minutes because thanks to Nintendo this is the longest Retronauts community podcast ever! You know we had to talk about the latest Direct and the announcement of Switch 2 while also making time for your comments and answers to last month's community question.
Speaking of which, I called an audible this month concerning the question so I hope you'll indulge me and use your words responsibly.
Specific items mentioned in this...
2025-04-27 11:00:28 +0000 UTC
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Stuart: I refuse to accept Sigma Star Saga as retro. In fact, I refuse to accept the Game Boy Advance as retro, let alone one of its latter-day titles. But it is, and it is getting a well-deserved, long-awaited re-release, therefore I have deigned to cover it after being given the opportunity by WayForward to grill Matt Bozon and Adam Tierney about this most Star Trek TOS of The Guardian Legend homages.
If you are unfamiliar with Sigma St...
2025-04-21 11:00:28 +0000 UTC
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April 14, 2015: One shot, one kill
by Diamond Feit
In 1980 SNK invented and named the Boss battle as we know it in the video game world, introducing powerful enemies who periodically appeared to test the player's skill in Sasuke Vs. Commander. Originally called oyabun (親分 ...
2025-04-20 11:00:30 +0000 UTC
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Jeremy: As promised, here are the visual accompaniments to our MGC 2025 episode.
The PowerPoint here accompanies the first segment of the episode, on Chrono Trigger. The video goes with the Game Tapes segment. Please enjoy!
2025-04-18 11:00:17 +0000 UTC
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UPDATE NOTE: It turns out that Brian somehow vanished from the audio mix in the final MP3 file conversion—a strange glitch that I've never seen happen before. I've uploaded a new stereo file that restores his contributions. It's twice as large, but it's complete, and that's what counts.
Jeremy: This week's episode comes to you hot ’n fresh from Midwest Gaming Classic a couple of weeks ago. Yep, it's a pair of live panels. I really feel like we've got a great handle on our l...
2025-04-18 11:00:11 +0000 UTC
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No, no, no, this isn't a podcast weighing the entire output of two video game publishers against one another, we're talking about the very specific crossover series of fighting* games that SNK and Capcom created featuring their two stables of characters.
Obviously Diamond Feit is hosting this week, joined by returning genre experts Kevin Bunch and
2025-04-14 11:00:41 +0000 UTC
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April 1985: More than meets the eye
by Diamond Feit
It's funny how certain pop cultural properties proliferate across various mediums but manage to miss out on one that, by all rights, they really should have conquered. 20th Century Fox enjoyed full ownership over the Alien and Predator characters and yet, despite years of crossover comics, vide...
2025-04-13 11:00:52 +0000 UTC
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Jeremy: Good news, everyone! Now you can play a video game!
This episode marks the first of hopefully many entries in the Metroidvania Book Club series. You'll hear a full explanation of the concept in the podcast itself, but it's pretty straightfoward and hardly original. Every three months, we'd like to highlight a different metroidvania game for a two-part deep-dive discussion. Each game will most likely receive the same treatment: an introductory episode that breaks ap...
2025-04-07 11:00:10 +0000 UTC
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March 31, 2015: Proverb Edge? Maxim Threshold? Adage Brink?
by Diamond Feit
Love it or hate it, the portmanteau "Metroidvania" is here to stay. Many writers have tried to introduce generic descriptors for action games where players explore a singular "level" for power-ups and items that unlock new areas, but the people have heard "search action" and "exploraction" for yea...
2025-04-06 11:00:08 +0000 UTC
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What's scarier: being trapped in an endless Lovecraftian nightmare, or the fact that Bloodborne is now old enough to be covered on Retronauts? While you mull that one over, listen in as Bob Mackey, Brendan James (of the Blowback podcast) and 2025-04-04 07:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Kevin: The inexorable march of Space Invaders has finally reached Retronauts! Even 47 years since its debut it’s hard to fathom the grip this game had in coin-operated entertainment in general and especially Japan. Without Tomohiro Nishikado’s classic, would Japan’s game industry and broader culture look anything like it does today? Honestly, probably not! Space Invaders was a phenomenon beyond anything save for perhaps Pac-Man in the US, and that’...
2025-03-31 11:00:10 +0000 UTC
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First thing's first: if the formatting below looks weird (oddly sized text perhaps), I'm throwing my hands up because somehow cutting & pasting text from my documents into Patreon has given me all kinds of trouble in recent weeks. I'm not about to write original text in THIS CMS, thank you very much!
With my complaining out of the way, please enjoy this latest community podcast. Stu is back! He says a few bad words! But not that one bad word he keeps threatenin...
2025-03-30 11:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Jeremy: I've been out of the press long enough that when we start commemorating the anniversary of games I reviewed, it makes me feel very old and very mortal. Nevertheless, we persevere! Because this month is the 10th anniversary of what the kids these days would call a "banger," and not in the sense that it's a British sausage. No, we're talking about Axiom Verge, the game that out-Metroided Metroid in the darkest days of no one making Metroid&n...
2025-03-24 11:00:11 +0000 UTC
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March 22, 2005: You have selected "Deicide"
by Diamond Feit
I was never a big reader as a kid but the books I read, I read them cover to cover over and over until I seared an image of every page into my memory. I wish I could say I retained some crucial piece of information from that experience that has helped me in my adult life, but aside from 2025-03-23 11:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Doom took over the gaming landscape in the early '90s, but emerged just as the first wave of video game movies hit theaters. So when the 21st century was upon us, Hollywood decided to strike while the iron was still kind of warm and delivered us a Doom movie starring none other than Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. But did this silver screen adaptation faithfully translate the white-knuckle, heavy metal, hell on earth vibe of the id Software classic? On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, ...
2025-03-21 07:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Jeremy: AS YOU KNOW, "Years-in-Review Revues" are always exercises in attempting to corral chaos as a large group of people attempts to cover a wide range of topics with ample room for digression. Sometimes, chaos escapes. And really, I think that's all I have to say about this one... but the fact that the title spoils our failure to even reach 1995 probably gives it away. Enjoy!?!?
Edits by Greg Leahy. Art by Nick Wanserski.
March 11, 1995: tick tock on the clock but the party don't stop, no
by Diamond Feit
Mankind will never come up with a greater invention than the concept of time. I love language—it keeps me employed for sure—but I do wish we had stopped making new ones once we had enough words to ask each other for the exact location of the nearest toilet. I'm grateful that c...
2025-03-16 11:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Kevin: If you listen to this podcast, you’re probably well-versed in the many, many formats video games have been and continue to be distributed in: digital downloads, cartridges, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, floppy disks, cassette tapes, even vinyl. But good old-fashioned paper has served as a way to distribute game programs since the 1960s, and that brings us to today’s topic: type-in games.
If you had access to a computer (or even some game consoles) and some way to save an...
2025-03-10 11:00:12 +0000 UTC
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March 1995: CREATaNEWSOCIETY
by Diamond Feit
I used to have this rule about sequels that stated they had to debut within a decade of the original work or else I dismissed them out of hand. Why would I make such a rule given that I have no authority on the matter? I suspect it was just one of the many little things I came up with during my teenage years to assert ...
2025-03-09 11:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Nadia: This week on Retronauts: Show a little respect for faerie tales, Riskbreaker. Yasumi Matsuno's masterpiece action RPG Vagrant Story is officially a quarter of a century old, so now's as good a time as any for a few old-ass writers to swap stories about the cold, dead corridors of Lea Monde. I'm joined by noted Risk-taker Jeremy Parish and Alexander O. Smith, the translator and localizer responsible for bringing life to Vagrant Story's western script...
2025-03-07 12:00:13 +0000 UTC
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