John Szczepaniak, author of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers joins PushDustIn, Nantendo and Oliver Jameson (Minus World) in this special podcast! We discuss John’s work, as well as writing about video games. 
For more information about John, as well as other articles from him, check out his page on Gamasutra.
After listening to the podcast, please check out Volume 1, as well as Volume 2.
If you are on the fence, PushDustIn has written a pretty positive review of Volume 1. Volume 2 has even more shocking stories and interesting insights!
We discussed Maps to the Stars (of development) within the podcast. We also briefly mentioned John’s articles on the Zelda CD-I articles.
Check out the Game Preservation Society.
The original kickstarter, along with updates to for The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers can be found here.
Thanks again to Oliver and John for joining us in this SourceCast! Big thanks to ThunderCat for his diligent work on cleaning up the audio!
- Smash Ultimate Development Timeline - May 16, 2020
- Straight from the Source: Koji Igarashi on Castlevania in Smash, Bloodstained - October 16, 2018
- Sakurai Discusses Isabelle, Echoes, and Newcomers - September 26, 2018
The talk about game preservation reminds me of a story. I heard that Taito, the company which made my favorite co-op game of all time, lost the original code for Bubble Bobble and had to recreate the game by playing the ports of the game, as it has been ported to just about everything. When you consider that some of the ports of the original still function slightly differently in ways the player might not even notice, it makes me curious if the original actually exists anymore if versions after the source code was lost were technically remakes. That’s a scary thought, and it makes me realize that game preservation is more of a serious topic than I had originally thought it was.