My guest today is the American voice-actor and activist Sarah Elmaleh. As a student at Wesleyan University she performed in a variety of theatrical productions and radio plays, spending a portion of her studies at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford. After graduating she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and was working as a stage actor when she fell in with the city's game development scene, and decided to commit her life to the art form. She moved to Los Angeles and began voicing...

My guest today is the founder and director of ZeniMax Online Studio, Matt Firor. After studying history at George Washington University, he co-founded the developer Interesting Systems Inc., where he created a MUD-style text adventure titled Darkness Falls. In 1995 he co-founded Mythic Entertainment, where he produced pioneering online games such as Godzilla Online, Aliens Online, Starship Troopers: Battlespace, and, in 2001, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Dark Age of...

My guest today is a French film director and pioneer in the world of digital imaging. Born in Paris, he studied architecture and medicine at university before joining the film industry. He co-founded Duran Duboi, a postproduction house that created visual effects for music videos by artists including Prince, Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, and Boy George. As a VFX pioneer, he formed a close collaboration with the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with whom he worked on the feature films “Delicatessen”,...

My guest today is Hannah Nicklin, a British writer and narrative designer for video games. After studying Drama at Loughborough University, and Playwriting at the University of Birmingham, she returned to Loughborough for a doctorate in interactive design as anti-capitalist practice. After several years working as a poet, theatre-maker, and academic, in 2019 she moved into games full time: writing, narrative designing and co-producing Mutazione, the most nominated game in the 2020 IGF awards....

My guest today is the award-winning humourist, writer, and presenter Danny Wallace. Born in Dundee, Scotland, he published his first professional video game review at the age of thirteen while conducting work experience for Sega Power, a magazine that subsequently offered him a job. At 22, after graduating from The University of Westminster, he became a BBC comedy producer at, working on hit series such as Dead Ringers and The Mighty Boosh. In 2003 he published Join Me, a book about how he...

My guest today is Nainita Desai, the British composer for film, television and video games. Born and raised in London by her Indian parents, she earned a degree in mathematics, then studied sound design at the National Film and Television School. She started her career as a sound designer on the films Little Buddha, Lessons of Darkness and Death Machine, before branching into composition for television, including, among hundreds of others, the Oscar-nominated For Sama, the hit Netflix series...

My guest today is the American video game designer and programmer Eugene Jarvis. Born in California, he studied computer science at Berkeley, where, in the basement of the physics laboratory, he played the early video game Spacewar. After graduating he worked for Hewlitt Packard, but quit after three days to join Atari, where he began programming for some of the first computerised pinball machines. In the late seventies he joined Williams where he and a colleague came up with the idea for a...

My guest today is the German filmmaker Uwe Boll. Born in Wermelskirchen he decided he wanted to direct films at the age of ten, after seeing Marlon Brando star in Mutiny on the Bounty. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-thirties, however, that he directed his first major motion picture, Blackwoods, a psychological thriller that a critic for the New York Times described as ‘smart and diabolical’. It was, however, his adaptations of video games for which he made his name. House of the Dead,...

My guest today is the American video game artist and designer, Derek Yu. Born in Pasadena, California in the early eighties, he started mapping out games on graph paper when he was still a child. After graduating college with a degree in computer science, he moved to San Francisco to work as a freelance illustrator. In 2007 he developed a satirical run-and-gun freeware game titled “I’m O.K – A Murder Simulator”, a response to a challenge set down by the notorious critic of video games, (and...

In this special correspondence edition, host Simon Parkin reads out listeners' correspondence and answers your questions. Hear Simon discuss the recent, headline-making episode with former PlayStation President Chris Deering, listener responses to the controversy, as well as discussion of what term we should use to describe the genre formerly known as 'Metroidvania', Maddy Thorson's grey label platforms, and much, much more.  Be attitude for gains....

My guest today is an American businessman and the former and first president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Chris Deering. Raised in Boston, Massachusetts to immigrant parents, my guest had a strict upbringing. Despite the disadvantages he faced, he graduated with distinction with a degree in computer science at Boston College, then studied marketing at Harvard Business School. He first worked for the razor-manufacturer Gillette, rising to the rank of head of worldwide shaving, then...

My guest today is Eliot Higgins, a British citizen journalist and founder of Bellingcat, a website that specialises in open-source intelligence. In 2012, while unemployed, he became involved in online discussions about the conflict in Syria, where few journalists were able to operate. Despite having little prior interest in the region, he began to study videos of the conflict, and started a blog on which he analysed geodata and weaponry. This work exposed atrocities and helped establish an...

In this special episode, Simon is joined by comedian Glenn Moore to discuss the subject of July's My Perfect Console 'Game Club', The Messenger. Throughout July 2024, Glenn and Simon, along with many of you, the listeners, played through the 2018 platformer The Messenger, a game chosen by Abu Salim during his episode of My Perfect Console. Glenn and Simon discuss their experiences with the game, with input from you the listeners. They also talk about how Glenn managed to break his Nintendo...

My guest today is Maddy Thorson, a Canadian writer and designer for video games. At the age of 14, she obtained a copy of GameMaker, software on which she learned to make simple games. After studying computer science at Grande Prairie Regional College in Alberta, she moved to Vancouver and there rented a house in which she and her friends began working on a multiplayer combat game featuring four archers. TowerFall Ascension, became a huge hit. The following year, my guest took part in a game...

My guest today is Holly Gramazio, a writer, curator, and game designer. Born in Australia, she earned her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, then moved to London where she founded the Somerset House-based games festival Now Play This, an annual celebration of experimental games. In 2019 she wrote the script for Dicey Dungeons, a game that subsequently sold 850,000 copies and won the Indiecade Grand Jury Prize. In April this year, Vintage Books published her debut novel...

In this special episode, five My Perfect Console supporters share the games they would like to put on their ideal, fictional games machine, and the reasons behind their choices. If you would like to share your console with the My Perfect Console audience, head to www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole where you can become a supporter and receive a raft of these and other benefits. Be attitude for gains. https://plus.acast.com/s/my-perfect-console. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

My guest today is Luke Muscat, the Australian video game designer behind some of the best-known smart phone games yet made. After graduating from Queensland University of Technology with a degree in IT and Games, he joined Halfbrick Studio, a game developer in Brisbane that specialised in games licensed from film and TV. There he designed a simple yet compelling iPhone game in which players must slice fruit thrown into the air by swiping the device's touch screen with their finger. Fruit...

A special episode to celebrate the life and work of Brett Jones, an artist and animator for video games, film and television who passed away in July. Jones worked on the seminal N64 movie tie-in game, Goldeneye 007, which successfully brought the first person shooter genre to consoles. He made instrumental contributions to its sequel, Perfect Dark, then left the games industry to create VFX for film and television, contributing work to The Last Jedi, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Dr Who....

My guest today is the American video game developer Steve Meretzky. Born and raised in Yonkers, New York, he attended MIT, where he earned a degree in construction management. In 1981, after two years spent working in the construction industry, a friend asked him if he would like to become a tester for Infocom, a publisher that specialised in interactive fiction. He agreed and was soon invited to write a game of his own, the science fiction game Planetfall. After he included a reference to...

My guest today is an English writer for video games, TV, film, comics, and books. Born into a literary household – her father was the celebrated fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett –– she studied journalism at the University of Arts in London. After graduating she joined the staff of PC Zone, where she worked her way up from editorial assistant to the role of section editor. In 2002 she left journalism to write video games, soon earning a BAFTA nomination for her work on Heavenly Sword. In 2013...

My guest today is the British scriptwriter and librettist for opera, Richard Sparks. In 1978 he wrote a sketch for Rowan Aktinson, the actor who later played Mr Bean, which Atkinson performed in the Secret Policeman’s Ball, a series of benefit shows organised by John Cleese to raise funds for Amnesty International. The success of the sketch led my guest to become a writer for BBC2’s ‘Not the Nine O’Clock News’ comedy show, and a slew of other TV writing gigs followed. In 1992 he moved to Los...

My guest today is the American game writer and narrative designer Kelsey Beachum. After graduating from Michigan State University, she worked in publishing, first as editor of the Cryogenic Society of America, then in editorial operations for the satirical current affairs publication, The Onion. In 2012 stared work on a space-mystery game titled Outer Wilds. Published in 2019 by Annapurna Interactive, Outer Wilds released to widespread acclaim. My guest was named a Nebula Award finalist for...

My guest today is Mike Drucker, an American comedy writer and producer. After graduating with a master’s degree in literature from New York University, he worked as a localisation editor for Nintendo, writing English language jokes for games such as Kid Icarus: Uprising. After a year working as Head Video Writer for the website IGN, he joined Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, then, in 2014, went with Jimmy to the Tonight Show. After a stint as head writer for Bill Nye Saves the World, my guest...

My guest today is Michael Sherman, director of esports for Riot Games. While attending the University of Texas at Dallas for Computer Science, he worked as an Automotive Safety Software Engineer for Texas Instruments, inventing a wireless car-seat that would sound an alarm if a child was left in the car. In 2013 he moved into the emerging world of competitive video game playing, developing broadcast tools for live esports competitions. The following year he dropped out of college to help...