Brass, Flesh and a Genius Grant [Podcast]

I open with a fan who has rebuilt P.T. from its own PS4 code, which raises the question under the whole hour: when a game can disappear, who is responsible for keeping it? Danny Snelson calls in from New York with a ZipDeck in tow, and we take a detour through Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, which Danny calls a faithful betrayal.

The A story is my interview with Murlo, the Manchester producer Chris Pell, who left a decade of DJing to build Something Beautiful alone, a point-and-click rhythm game with an album inside it and jukeboxes made of flesh. I play three clips from our conversation: why he left performance, what a good interaction feels like, and the lineage he claims, from William Blake and Goya to the Luddites. Danny reads Blake as a printmaker who controlled every stage of production and finds a model there for the solo developer. Then two quick ones that rhyme with Murlo's sense of touch: Sahej Rahal's Atithi, which you play by dragging your hands across brass, and Berrysoft's CORPSE FARM, where the crop is flesh.

In the news, Zhou Yichen is pressing GRANDMA onto 5,000 metal Game Boy cartridges because a story this permanent should not live in plastic, and Danny checks whether metal actually outlasts plastic. It does not. Walaber's Reason and Rhyme is built for exactly two players, and Unrelated Studio's Lofsöng turns the problem of marking a nuclear waste site into level design.

Then Joseph DeLappe and Biome Collective's game about Guantánamo, made with Mansoor Adayfi, who was held there for 14 years without charge. We close on Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur, whose citation names a work you play. I have been waiting for that since 2014. Danny asks what the word genius does to work made by many hands.

Links

• Murlo Builds a World You Can Play, my feature on Something Beautiful
• P.T. is being rebuilt for PC from its own PS4 code
• Scoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead Space
• Vadim Nickel on sound design
• Bennett Foddy's Games Taste Like Gasoline
• Sahej Rahal's Atithi interrupts our sense of touch
• The crop is flesh in Berrysoft's CORPSE FARM
• Zhou Yichen's GRANDMA is coming to a metal cartridge
• GRANDMA on Kickstarter
• Walaber's Reason and Rhyme is co-op for exactly two
• Lofsöng hides a nuclear warning
• A game about Guantánamo is being built with its survivor
• Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur brings games one step closer
• Christine Sun Kim, MacArthur Fellow
• Christine Sun Kim, Up and Away, Hyundai Artlab
• Kill Screen in 2014: Will a game designer ever win a MacArthur "genius" grant?
• The Killscreen Horror Collection
• Danny Snelson

Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.