Fringe Game History Podcast Jeremy Penner

Shawn Hargreaves talks about the Allegro game programming library and the community that sprung up around it in
the late 1990s. We talk about what happens when your hobby project accidentally turns into something with a life
of its own, the inexplicable popularity of games involving the murder of Barney the Dinosaur, and the vital role
of accessible tooling in providing a path to learning.

Leonard Richardson talks about a number of free and open-source games he made, as well as his time running a
goofy BBS as a kid. We discuss the experience of having dozens of strangers create their own riffs of a game he
tossed together in a couple of days, writing interactive fiction as a stepping stone to writing non-interactive
fiction, and Nethack code patches as a form of fanfiction.

Jonah Davidson talks about his time as part of the rpg2knet RPG Maker community. We talk
about the desire to push the limits of the tool's strange constraints, the rite of passage
of dealing with terrible translations, and how a community can spend a lot of effort trying
to emulate the games it loves, only to slowly discover that the games that break out are
the ones that are nothing like them.

My childhood best friend Roman Banias talks about the games he made for fun as a young
child. We discuss the magic and wonder of type-in programming books, the home computer
as a toy, the act of creation as a natural extension of childhood play, and the Alien
Zit Cinematic Universe.

Phil Salvador of The Obscuritory talks about his tenure as an administrator of the Mario
Fan Games Galaxy. We discuss the driving energy behind goofy joke games, the fragile
nature of early internet communities, the interconnected nature of fan sites, and Waligie,
a community icon born from a random poster's terrible spelling.

Kirk Israel talks about JoustPong, a game he has made and remade many times over the years.
We dive into the homebrew community surrounding the Atari 2600 in the early 2000s, the strain
of obsessive assembly coding on relationships, and the challenge of finding a supportive community.