A Moment with: The Retro Hour
Paul Drury meets the hosts of the popular retro gaming podcast
We talk to the creators behind this fantastic retro gaming-based podcast
Since January 2016, Nottingham-based Dan Wood and Ravi Abbott have produced a weekly podcast, which mixes retro gaming news and comment with bigname interviews. New episodes are released every Friday over at theretrohour.com where you can also explore the vast archive of over 160 previously aired shows.
What prompted you to produce a podcast?
Dan Wood: We were frustrated that the retro gaming podcasts we listened to tended to have an American perspective. Sure, we love the NES and the Atari 2600, but we wanted to talk about the Amiga 500 and the Spectrum, too. We also wanted to get the real stories behind our favourite games and companies, so the decision to feature a special celebrity guest each episode was reached early in the planning process.
What can listeners expect to hear on the show?
Ravi Abbott: Every Friday we bring you a jam-packed hour of audio entertainment. The first half is ‘Retro News’ so we cover items like new game and hardware releases for old systems, articles, think-pieces and general goings on in the retro world. Then the second half of the show is dedicated to an in-depth interview with a gaming industry figure – a games designer, musician, artist, CEO, magazine reporter or anybody we think our listeners will find interesting.
Tell us about some of your favourite guests.
DW: We have been joined by huge industry legends like Nolan Bushnell, John Romero and Tom Kalinske, who were amazing. We recently did a full episode examining the history of Firebird Software, which was fascinating, plus we spoke to Howard Scott Warshaw for two hours as he was driving across America, talking about
ET and his history at Atari. Hearing Dave Haynie explain the design decisions of the Amiga 4000 and Scott Miller giving us the history of 3D Realms and the rise of Shareware was geek heaven and getting Andy Crane to give us an hour-long inside story on Bad Influence, one of my favourite TV shows as a kid, was special, as he’d never done a podcast before. We still pinch ourselves that we get to speak to our childhood heroes every week.
Have you managed to coax any surprising revelations from your guests?
RA: Bret Mogilefsky revealed he used that annoying talking paper clip ‘Clippy’ from Microsoft Office to create all the lip sync for Grim Fandango! Also, we had some crazy tales about the development of Carmageddon from Patrick Buckland and Fergus Mcneill about how they strapped a camera to the front of a car and repeatedly drove at a staff member to get the effect of somebody hitting the windscreen!
We hear that The Retro Hour is pretty popular.
DW: We recently passed our third anniversary and we’ve been featured in The Guardian, The Observer and by the BBC. We’ve had television news segments and we make the top five in the itunes tech and gaming podcast charts most weeks now. The success of the show still surprises us. Ravi, myself and our cohost Joe Fox are just mates who like to chat about old games, so it’s incredible so many people enjoy listening to it. Any future plans for the podcast? RA: We have always wanted to get Sir Clive Sinclair and Steve Wozniak on the show and we would love to get more female guests on to talk about their contribution to the history of gaming which is often overlooked. Roberta Williams of Sierra Online would be a fascinating interview. We have also been experimenting with livestreaming so you might be able to see our ugly mugs more on-screen!
Tune in at theretrohour.com.