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Love of the worlds created by video game designers and personalities drives Alex Smith & Jeffrey Daum (history, law, CS degrees) to provide a scholarly yet light-hearted discussion of how arcade, home console, and PC games merged into a Video Game Industry. Emphasis is on the combination of business and creative elements needed for financial success. Interviews of Atari, EA, Activision, & other execs with detailed source evaluations produce the insights you hear in these 140+ hours!
Episodes
21 hours ago
21 hours ago
TCW Podcast Episode 254 - The Elder Scrolls: Arena & Daggerfall
Bethesda Softworks, founded in 1985 by Christopher Weaver with sports titles like Gridiron and Wayne Gretzky Hockey along with licenses like The Terminator, pivoted to RPGs. Demo scene legend Julian LeFay hired Vijay Lakshman as designer and buffer to management so LeFay could focus on games. Together they birthed The Elder Scrolls: Arena, a gladiator combat simulator that morphed, nine months into a 13-month development cycle, into a first-person 3D epic inspired by Ultima Underworld. Arena evolved from a combat management game to a full RPG with a procedurally generated world, unique races like Argonians and Khajiit, and a plot to topple the wizard Tharn. With the second game, LeFay, challenged by Sandy Petersen's claim that CRPGs could never match tabletop RPGs, made Daggerfall a massive world the size of Great Britain: 15,000 cities, towns, and dungeons; 44 regions; 100 factions; skill leveling based on what players actually did; and reputation grinds to unlock quests and plot. Ted Peterson, who took over lead design after Lakshman left, wove a complex plot with gray themes, diverse motivations, and moral quandaries into a simulator packed with layered systems rather than pure RPG simplicity. It sold out the initial run, hit 700,000 units, and became Bethesda's best game yet, bringing fresh air to a fallow RPG era!
TCW 156 - Madden for Some Football: https://www.theycreateworlds.com/episodes/TCW156
Gridiron (Amiga): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0q7sc_T3FU
Wayne Gretzky Hockey (NES): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Apj9IRcpQ
Tell Me Your Name (Russia Heat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYpcZ2NfMYU
(Explicit) Sodan & Magician 42 - TechTech (Amiga): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB5CujcTN8A
Terminator 2029 (PC/DOS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-PBi-N1hQo
Flesh+Blood (Trailer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVyLe-k16gw
Jason And The Argonauts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq4requMqvY
Khajit/Khajiit Has Wares: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/khajiit-khajiit-has-wares
Ultima Underworld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee4PUcpGSn8
The Elder Scrolls: Arena (Box Art): https://bigboxcollection.com/TESArena.3DBox
The Elder Scrolls: Arena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjEn6ETA7EM
What Do You Do With a B.A. in English? (Avenue Q): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYenQEjvlD0
Walk Across the Entire Map in Dragonfall Unity (Timelapse 512x): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xTvdK88cww
The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpX5y6jiafg
New episodes are on the 1st and 15th of every month!
TCW Email: feedback@theycreateworlds.com
BlueSky: @theycreateworlds.bsky.social
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theycreateworlds
Alex's Video Game History Blog: http://videogamehistorian.wordpress.com
Alex's book: http://bit.ly/TCWBOOK1
Intro Music: Josh Woodward - Airplane Mode - Music - "Airplane Mode" by Josh Woodward. Free download: http://joshwoodward.com/song/AirplaneMode
Outro Music: RoleMusic - Bacterial Love: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic/Pop_Singles_Compilation_2014/01_rolemusic_-_bacterial_love
Copyright: Attribution: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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