Joe Martin – Product Marketing for Startups

Update: Unlimited Hyperbole is no longer available. There are two episodes preserved by the Thief community on Youtube which are linked in the episode index, however other episodes have since been lost to time.

Unlimited Hyperbole is a new, tiny podcast I’ve made. It’s about games and the stories we tell about them. I’ll be releasing a new episode every Monday, each with a special guest. I’ll be talking to them about a topic decided for a season of five episodes. This season: “My Favourite Game”.

In this first episode Dan Pinchbeck, Creative Director of TheChineseRoom and designer on Dear Esther, talks about his favourite game: STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Why did the game make Dan re-evaluate his PhD on narrative in computer games? How did the tortured development process create a better game than if work had gone smoothly? Listen in to find out, or subscribe using the buttons above.

For more information on Unlimited Hyperbole and the idea behind it, continue after the jump…

So.

I’ve been wanting to create something which looked at the individual experiences players take from games for roughly the last two years, but it wasn’t until earlier this year I decided it would be done as a podcast. I was interviewing Dan and Jonathan Blow at the time and suddenly realised that I finally had the freedom and means to work on the project as I wanted. It was something Jon said about how indie developers need to control the scope of their projects which set it all off.

Holding on to this, I laid down some aims to help me control the scope as I worked on it. I wanted episodes to be short; focused in on single topics. I wanted the flexibility to introduce new ideas. I didn’t want to recycle the same guests and ideas over and over. I wanted the show to be informed, intelligent; good.

Unlimited Hyperbole is what I ended up with. It’s tiny. No two episodes are the same. It’s incredibly focused, with interviews culled down from more than an hour to just seven to fifteen minutes.

Whether the show is actually any good or not…is up to you. I’m hoping that, if you like it, you’ll champion it on forums and Facebook, or that you’ll share the widget on your own blog. Tell me what you think, even – because it’s taken me bloody ages to get this far and I don’t feel like stopping now.

Thanks to Harriet Jones, Paul Goodhead and Joe Percy.