My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

My guest today is a video game executive whose career spans the medium’s earliest home computers to the rise of the modern console business. He created his first games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s, before joining Microsoft in 1986, where he spent a decade as an early developer on Excel and Word. 

In 1996, he left the Office team to pursue his passion for games, founding Micros...

Prokop Jirsa is a Czech game designer whose work has helped redefine what historical realism can look like in a modern role-playing game. After completing his Master’s degree at the Prague University of Economics and Business, he joined Warhorse Studios as a designer on Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

There, he helped shape the game’s uncompromising approach to first-person immersion, historically grounded comba...

Dr. Elin Festøy is a Norwegian creative producer, researcher, and storyteller whose work uses interactive media to illuminate some of the most painful and overlooked histories of the 20th century. After completing a Master’s degree in 1995, she began her career as a journalist covering tech during the early emergence of digital culture. She later founded the transmedia studio Teknopilot, and in 2013 began a...

Jon Ingold is a British game designer and writer whose work has helped redefine how narrative, choice, and player agency function in interactive storytelling. He began making parser-based text adventures and releasing them free on the internet. After studying mathematics at Cambridge University, he moved into professional game development at Sony PlayStation, where he worked as a designer in the concept group on several unreleased ...

Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with the reclusive game designer, Phil Fish.

Phil studied game design in Montreal and, after a brief stint working at Ubisoft, left to begin work on a game of his own, a platformer that combined the art style of the Super Nintendo classics of his youth, with perspective-shifting innovations of his own.

Six years in the making, ...

Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with comedian, writer and podcaster, Heather Anne Campbell.

My guest today is an Emmy-nominated writer, sketch comedian, voice actor and performer. As a teenager she studied improv comedy at the famous ImprovOlympic studio in her home city of Chicago, training that prepared her for when she later starred on Whose Line Is It Anyway&nbs...

Please enjoy this collection of some of our favourite clips from My Perfect Console episodes released in 2025. 

Featuring: Tonda Ros, Kat Abugazaleh, Nathan Brown, Adanna Nedd, Joel Morris, Basia Bulat, Andy Davidson, Bennett Foddy, Rami Ismail, Brian Gibson, Greg Jenner, Chris Plante, Tomm Hulett, Harvey Smith, Mark Cerny, Dr. Greg Zeschuk, Lorien Testard, and Alexander O. Smith.

Become a My Perfect Console supporter and re...

Please enjoy this collection of some of our favourite clips from My Perfect Console episodes released in 2025. 

Featuring: Tonda Ros, Kat Abugazaleh, Nathan Brown, Adanna Nedd, Joel Morris, Basia Bulat, Andy Davidson, Bennett Foddy, Rami Ismail, Brian Gibson, Greg Jenner, Chris Plante, Tomm Hulett, Harvey Smith, Mark Cerny, Dr. Greg Zeschuk, Lorien Testard, and Alexander O. Smith.

Become a My Perfect Console supporter and re...

A special episode with the winner of the My Perfect Console of the Year award, crowning the most popular console designed by a guest on the show this year, as voted by the listeners to the show.

Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole

Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025

The year is winding down, inboxes are quietening (lol), time is about to lose all meaning, and the year’s great cultural arguments are finally ready to be settled. Perfect timing, then, for My Perfect Console: Game of the Year 2025.

In this special episode, host Simon Parkin is joined by comedian Glenn Moore to build two consoles that capture what this year felt like to play. 

Expect games ...

Harvey Smith is a game designer and writer whose work has helped shape some of the most atmospheric and influential games of the last two decades. After serving in the U.S. Air Force he began his career in video games as a tester on the formative System Shock.

Then he joined Ion Storm worked as lead designer on Deus Ex, one of the most influential immersive sims of the era. In 2008 he became a partner at Arkane Studios, where h...

Alex Seropian is a pioneering American video game developer whose work helped shape some of the most iconic series in the medium. After studying mathematics at the University of Chicago, he co-founded Bungie in 1991, first developing Operation Desert Storm then titles such as Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, and Myth.

In 2001, he and his team released Halo: Combat Evolved, a landmark first-person shooter that not only revolutio...

Mark Cerny is an American programmer, and game designer whose career has shaped not only how we play, but the systems we play on. A San Francisco native, he dropped out of UC Berkeley at 17 after receiving an invitation to join Atari. At 18 he designed the arcade hit Marble Madness.

He then moved to Japan to work with Sega, for whom he founded the Sega Technical Institute, developers of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Then played a ...

Brandon Adler is an American game director and producer whose career has been defined by his work on some of Obsidian Entertainment’s most acclaimed role-playing games. After serving in Iraq with the U.S. Air Force, my guest studied Game Art & Design at The Art Institute of California. 

He joined Obsidian as a tester for Neverwinter Nights 2 before working his way up through various disciplines ...

In this special correspondence edition, Simon reads out your letters and answers your questions.

Why are guests so often caught out when asked to name their console? What is the best moment in a video game? What might a My Perfect Console game jam look like? And can Simon settle a dispute between a father and his kids in the car?All this and much more.

And congratulations to letter-writer Spencer Tennant, who wins a signed co...

My guest today is a British game designer whose ingenuity and persistence turned a bedroom project into one of the most iconic multiplayer series in video games. In 1991, he took the characters from the popular Amiga game Lemmings and placed them in a game of his own, a simulation of artillery fire. 

At school, the game proved popular among his friends, so he worked on it further, replacing the Lemm...

Shuhei Yoshida is former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, and one of the most beloved figures in the video games industry. After graduating from Kyoto University with a degree in economics, he joined Sony in 1986 to coordinate the company’s PC business.

Then, as one of the early members of the PlayStation project, he helped oversee the development of landmark titles across multiple generations, inc...

Danny Abbasi is a musician best known as the drummer for Miniseries, the genre-blurring band whose dreamy, cinematic soundscapes have been turning heads in the indie music scene. After graduating from the University of Glasgow with a degree in English Literature, he moved to China where he worked as a professional musician. 

In 2023, having returned to the UK, he joined Miniseries, the band co-founded by Angi...

Rami is a developer, speaker, and global ambassador for indie games. As the co-founder of Vlambeer, he helped create a string of critically acclaimed titles—including Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Nuclear Throne—that helped define a new era of independent game development. 

Beyond his work on games, he’s become one of the most visible and influential voices in the indust...