The Video Game Newsroom Time Machine is a weekly retro gaming podcast in which we travel back in time to see what was making headlines 40, 30, and 20 years ago in the arcade, video game, and computer gaming business and interview industry veterans.
We try to put those events into historical context to understand how the industry of today came to be.
It's fun and educational! (in case you need to justify listening to it to a significant other)
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Oct 15, 2025
Few events in video game history are more legendary than the
Console War between Sega and Nintendo. Our guest today was
one of the generals of that war, the head of Sega of America, Tom
Kalinske.
Tom's story is not just a story of Sega though, he started out in
advertising, helping create the still iconic...
Aug 26, 2025
Japan goes after arcades,
Nintendo's Famicon gets its first licensee &
Gamers come together online
These stories and many more on this episode of the VGNRTM!
This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and
around the video game industry in October 1984.
As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover...
Aug 17, 2025
After spending almost 2 decades trying to make MUD a viable commercial project, Richard returns to academia after publishing his seminal book, Designing Virtual Worlds, and begins teaching and researching game worlds and player behavior.
We delve deep into the study of games, talk about why it's important and the future...
Aug 2, 2025
While there are many founders of the video game industry writ large, the dawn of multiplayer gaming is a much more select group of luminaries and our guest today, Richard Bartle is most definitely one of them. He cocreated MUD1, the first Multi User Dungeon game as a college student and has gone on to help shape the...
Jun 30, 2025
Mechanical amusements have long been a mainstay of theme parks and travelling fairs. In the 1980s, this technology entered the realm of the arcade, most notably through Chuck E. Cheese and since then, has merged with the traditional dark ride to become the interactive dark ride, a mixture of animatronics, motion,...