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.

It’s not unusual for fans of any medium to have favourites, but in gaming we sometimes seem to take that idea a little bit further than most and can end up defining ourselves by our views on particular games or ideas. In this way, games can sometimes end up defining our own characters as we label ourselves based on the games we love and loathe.

Darren Delay is many things – an independent developer, a student, a programmer – but just as important as these labels is that he’s a fan of platform games too. Characters such as Sonic the Hedgehog have ended up having a huge impact on how he approaches all sorts of games, he says. In the final episode of our third season we talk to Darren about Sonic, his love of mechanics over narrative and why God of War tells a better story than Braid.

Unlimited Hyperbole is a short, 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’ve been talking about “Matters of Character” – but to find out more about the production of this episode, read after the jump.

So.

Season Three draws to a close and Harriet and I are now in the middle of planning a fourth season to run next year. That’s pretty amazing, to be honest, because Unlimited Hyperbole’s long-term fate has been the subject of much consideration over the last 12 months.

You see, originally the plan for the show was just for me to do a short run of about five to ten episodes all on my own. I had an idea I wanted to make and thought that, if I did it for a bit, I might be able to avoid starving through it. I therefore planned to sell it to a site, turning Unlimited Hyperbole into the Official Bit-tech Podcast, maybe. It was only after producing an (unreleased) prototype that I realised the show would really benefit from having a second party on board – and it’s there that Harriet got involved. We got started.

By the time the first season had finished though, I’d changed my mind. I’d already turned down paying advertising for the show once and, though friends were encouraging me to partner the show with a website, I felt that wasn’t the direction I wanted to take it anymore. Season Two saw me toying with the idea of a Kickstarter: one that would fund an album release of Season Three, plus an extra episode or two for high-up backers. We’d raise a small sum, create a fun and tangible product, then go out with a bang after Season Three, never to air again. This was the plan all the way through Season Two.

When we got to the end of Season Two though, I had another change of heart. I realised I didn’t particularly want to stop running the show – that there were still some really great topics to explore. The topic we’ve chosen for Season Four (which I’ll announce next week) is one I’ve been desperate to sink my teeth into for years, in fact.

Throughout this season, the future of Unlimited Hyperbole has been a bit up in the air. We haven’t been sure what we’re going to do, when or if the show was ever going to end and so on. It’s only after a lot of consideration and frustration that we’ve decided simply to stop worrying about it, ironically. What matters most to us is that we can make a show we’re proud of, even if it’s not perfect.

We’ll worry about everything else later.