ODR [Outdoor Rink] Hockey Heroes is an exciting new arcade-style hockey game from Christopher Atallah, a fellow hockey historian who has played all the stick-and-puck game conversions and put the best influences back into his game. On the eve of this year's hockey season, we talk about our diehard hockey habits, create the Mount Rushmore of hockey videogames, and give an exciting preview for Atallah's new game ODR Hockey Heroes, inspired by NHL 94, Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, NHL 3-on-3...

Michael Long of Foolish Mortals joins the show to discuss Kaiju Wars, a great riff on Advance Wars that pits your military against a rogue's gallery of awesome Kaiju. The game is a unique spin on the turn-based strategy play style employing timed puzzles to route the Kaijus before they cause unspeakable destruction to each area. We love Kaijus, Advance Wars, and Kaiju Wars, and now we get to tell Michael Long's Game Dev Story.

Nolan Bushnell is one of the foremost figures in the world of games, one of the first true innovators in the market who brought the coin-op experience home, Bushnell brought us Atari, Pong, the 2600, and Chuck E Cheese. Few creators in games have given us so much... and now, Nolan Bushnell tells us his Game Dev Story, from the storied beginnings of console games to the expansion into his own arcade spaces to his present work in cultivating a game market for education. Bushnell is one of a...

Zachtronics made singular games for engineers and people who make games. They made the game that inspired Minecraft. Imagine the breadth of their influence and it's clear what their open-ended puzzle games have truly inspired in modern game design. We chat with the studio's founder Zach Barth about the legendary history of these programming-forward computer games, the weight of outsized influence, working for Valve, and what he's up to today. This is Zach Barth's Game Dev Story.

Andres, Carlos, and Edmundo Bordeu (ACE Team) are surrealist Chilean game developers who began with Doom and Quake mods and led to a publishing contract with Atlus. The eccentricities of the Zeno Clash & Rock of Ages games point to a colorful story about a studio coding outside the lines. There’s even more to the story and we’re proud to help tell the story of three brothers and their videogame dream in Chile. This is ACE Team's Game Dev Story.

Alongside his wife Roberta Williams, Ken Williams co-founded Sierra On-Line, the most influential computer game publisher of their era. Hundreds of games followed. Sierra On-Line published everything from perennial in-house favorites like King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry to outside games that defined generations like Half-Life and Ultima. This is an interview podcast about the foundation of Sierra On-Line, a business partnership, life after game development, and returning to the fold. This...

Ron Gilbert designed some of the most enduring adventure games, Maniac Mansion (1987) and The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), and is rightly heralded as one of our great genre pioneers. Gilbert's career, now stretching over several decades, offers many inflection points, and thoughtful swerves with and against the tides of the market. In this edition of Game Dev Story, we delve into Gilbert's full career, spanning from his time at LucasArts, to the foundation of the top-tier children's...

Quentin De Beukelaer has gone from designing major games with Ubisoft to creating his own pixel horror scape, blending the styles of David Lynch & Satoshi Kon, with original music scored by Akira Yamaoka. Quentin joins the show to discuss his path to game development, the difference between developing massive franchises and more personal indie projects, and the Game Dev Story for his studio Atelier QDB's new narrative horror game, Decarnation.

The best cult cinema of the century is being made in Uganda. We interview the creator of some of Africa's best contemporary film exports, Nabwana I.G.G., and documentarian Cathryne Czubek who has made a new film about the Wakliwood project. Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010), Crazy World (2014), and Big Black (2016) will go down as some of the most thrilling action movies of our time. We talk about the influences of visceral kung-fu movies, cultural differences which inform the materials, the...

Al Lowe is the creator of Leisure Suit Larry, the irreverent Sierra On-Line franchise that broke all the unspoken rules of game development. A crucial contributor through all of Sierra On-Line's brightest years, Al went from teaching music to students to developing videogames loaded with wit and personality. In our inaugural episode of Game Dev Story, a series where we talk to veteran and indie developers about their history in games, Al joins our show to share his philosophy about game...

Seattle-based filmmaker Reed Harkness stops by for a chat about his new documentary Sam Now, an exploration not just of family, but in the same vein as Sarah Polley's miraculous Stories We Tell (2012), about how we tell our stories, the ways our environment shapes who we are, and what it means to film our families. Sam Now is showing in Seattle this month at Northwest Film Forum & The Grand Illusion. You won't want to miss it.

Mickey Reese is creating a scene in Oklahoma. His many films are communal exhibitions made with friends, crafted out of love for the great American filmmakers who came before him. Reese's recent genre works have caught attention at festivals and now his Altman-esque Country Gold is seeking an audience. We had a great chat with the director, exploring the themes of his new film and its relationship with American movies about country music and the established canon of movies about the place of...

do it themselves, weaving together a neo-noir stoner comedy overflowing with dedication and homage to all of their favorite filmmakers. The film is The Lad Goodbye, and Vaughn and Jack are here to talk to its trio of creators, The Film Lads - Nolan, Kirk, and Victor. Today, find out how the lads met, the process that led to the creation of the film, its dizzying array of influences, how The Lad Goodbye's hazy stoner logic all came together, Letterboxd as a platform for social film discovery,...

Angus MacLane is the director of Pixar's latest venture Lightyear, returning the studio to their rightful place in theaters, and expanding upon the meta fiction of the Toy Story franchise. MacLane was previously co-director on Finding Dory (2016) and notably has directed a series of shorts and significant pieces of animation for the studio. Join us as we discuss the path to directing at Pixar, why Buzz needed his own origin story, what it's like to develop a major animated film during a...

It's our honor to welcome Charles Roxburgh to the show. As the director mastermind behind the Motern Media vehicle, Charles is responsible for so many of our new favorite cult movies and is just as amiable on our show as is apparent in all of his lovely movies. Join us for a longform open-hearted conversation discussing yet another gem in the Motern canon, but also our collective love of cult and outsider films as a whole. There are many details here you're just not gonna get anywhere else!

The incomparable Matt Farley joins the regular Moterncast crew to highlight a gem from the Motern catalogue: 2007’s Freaky Farley, a rare throwback to ultra specific horror tropes. You won’t want to miss our interview, full of new details you won’t find anywhere else about the slate of upcoming Motern projects!

Panah Panahi's Hit the Road is an emotional new journey from Iran. Directed by the son of one of Iran's great filmmakers, we had the pleasure to chat with Panahi about family ties, becoming a great director himself, controversy and Iranian cinema, and a profound love of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Mark Cousins is a foremost chronicler of the new film canon, expanding our culture and understanding of cinema in innovative and diverse new directions. With The Story of Film (2011) and Women Make Film (2018), Cousins has provided us with new pathways for discovery and a more diverse appreciation of film. With his new project, The Story of Looking, premiering at Telluride, Cousins creates a more internal document: exploring the gift of looking and what it means to observe the world. In The...

We have a chat with Jesse Blanchard, creator of Frank & Zed, a puppet horror film with analogues to Frankenstein and the history of puppet cinema. We chat about the Pacific Northwest puppetry scene, the technical side of working exclusively with puppets, and do a bit of show and tell with some of the puppets created for the feature. View the interview and our show and tell with the puppets on The Twin Geeks YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJINgApKpYE&t=283s

Bill Morrison is a director devoted to the lost films. His long-running filmography explores what often gets left behind. It’s a filmography of revival and preservation, with painstaking aesthetic attention paid to recovering films. This is a story about more than films. It’s about filling the gaps in our cinematic history. It’s about the intrinsic beauty of degrading nitrate film stocks and how that can all come to life, given just the right musical backing. Morrison’s latest film, let me...

Alien on Stage is the best kind of success story. It is about a troop of bus drivers moonlighting as amateur entertainers who want to put on a stage production of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). The documentary is the story of how their workmanlike production began on a small stage in Dorset before maximizing the show’s notoriety online, and landing a prime spot on stage in London’s West End. It is the story of workers creating the most amazing fan art. It was all I could do to write a glowing...

Recovery and representation are the topics of the day, in our audio interview with Blackwater director Boise Esquerra. A series of short films, the first of which is showing at Slamdance, Blackwater is the story of a country musician who has bottomed out and returned to her reservation, finding that addiction does not discriminate. We swap stories about our own personal journeys of recovery and what it means to put those stories on screen. There's also a great conversation about...

Bleeding Audio is the story of Oakland punk rock band The Matches. It’s not only about a group of talented young musicians bringing the band back together. It’s a narrative about the democratization of music and the challenges facing any band when the market shifted toward online file sharing and distribution. In the story of The Matches is the heroes journey, the story of every band with a dream of finding their audience. We’re honored to speak with director Chelsea Christer, producer Erin...

1980s training videos have carved out a peculiar niche on the internet. Searching for a purpose for his new picture, director Quinn Armstrong utilized these training videos as a lens to tell a different kind of police story. Given recent events, the context of his film has landed differently than planned at inception. Between a wide-ranging change in the discourse on police and the shifting realities of COVID, there has never been a stranger time to shop such a film to the market. We’re proud...