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.

As Season Three of Unlimited Hyperbole is focused on matters of character in videogames, talking to a writer such as James Swallow only makes sense; in addition to being a New York Times bestseller James has also worked on games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Killzone 2 and Fable: The Journey.

In this first episode for Season Three James talks about the process of writing for a game, how Eidos Montreal built a convincing cast for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and how writers are able to contribute to far more than just the character dialogue.

Unlimited Hyperbole is a short, weekly podcast about videogames and the stories we tell about them. The show is divided into seasons of five episodes, each with a topic that’s used as a prompt when interviewing special guests. This season we’re talking about “Matters of Character” – and to find out more about the production of this episode, read after the jump.

So.

We’re back. The break between seasons ended up lasting longer than anticipated – mainly thanks to the pressures of me moving house – but we’re finally back and have made a return with what was probably the episode I complained about most to friends and Twitter followers. The reason for that was purely the amount of audio James and I recorded; over two hours of uninterrupted chat which I had to edit down into a 15 minute show…

As many people pointed out, I could have chosen to make the show longer or to have released the audio unedited – except that I couldn’t of. One of the things which defines Unlimited Hyperbole is a set of rules I wrote to guide the show, the very first of which is ‘No episode shall be longer than 15 minutes’.

The reason for that rule is complex and ties into a lot what I feel about modern entertainment journalism, but to express it simply I think one area where the internet’s negatively affected a lot of entertainment journalism is in removing limitations such as wordcounts. Nobody omits needless words any more and in podcasts that manifests as over-long shows devoted more to in-jokes and arguments than meaningful discussion about games.

Of course, those shows can still be good and I do listen to a few, but Unlimited Hyperbole is about being more focused than that. It tries to be respectful of a listener’s time and uses limitations to drive creativity. That’s the idea, anyway.

That said, I might re-purpose some of the extra audio for a B-side in the future – just in case the gap between Season Three and Four is even longer than the last one…