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March 13, 2025 8 mins
Professional authors, journalists, gamers, and critics Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher introduce FunFactor: an insightful and incisive look back at the retro video game magazines that inspired them to do what they do. 

In this trailer they play highlights from the first few episodes, discuss the passions that drove them to read about games as well as play them, and the impacts--positive and negative--they had on them as writers and people.

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Sources include the Internet Archive, Retromags.com, our original research, and our personal magazine collections.

The FunFactor theme, and all other original songs, are composed and performed by Millennium Falck. Check out his work at millenniumfalck.com!
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
You've got fun factor. Two old gamers reviewing old video
game magazine reviews.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Aiden Moher, the games journalist you've read everywhere from
EGM to Wired.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
And I'm Ty Shelter. I'm best known for my sports
analysis at places like Bleacher Report, Vice, and Sirius XM,
but I have covered tech games and geek culture from
the inside for years.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I'm also the author of Fight, Magic Items, the History
of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese
RPGs in the West.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Well, I got a byline at Waypoint back when I'm
still a real waypoint.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah. Well, I'm a Hugo Award winning critic of science
fiction and fantasy.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Well, my virtual boy still works.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I know the exact TVL count for all of my
Tube dvs.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
The point is we know our stuff, and we know
it because we spent our formative years stuffing our brains
with all the gaming news features, interviews, previews, and yes,
reviews that a bunch of writers and editors barely older
than we were at the time could cram into one
or two hundred pages a month. So grab your gate
key and follow along as we travel through the history
of both video game media and our podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
You know, when I was twelve at the time, it
felt like a bunch of adults who knew what they
were talking about. Now I look at this and like
Chris Slat's like letter from the editor profile picture, he
looks like he's eighteen years old. He was a kid
writing a magazine with a bunch of other kids to
write about video games for younger kids.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
The had reviews in just this issue for ten different
systems PlayStation Saturn three D zero, Jaguar thirty two, x PC,
Sega CD, Sega Genesis, Sneess, and Arcade. It's fascinating to
me this era that we're starting with, like nineteen ninety five,
the sort of generation gap is just so different than

(01:49):
the ecosystem we have today.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I mean, we've got how ten consoles that you listened
off there Arcade which just doesn't exist. Yeah, is wild
to me, but like we're in an ecosystem where like
Nintendo does their Nintendo thing, Sony and Microsoft don't really
seem to know or remember how to actually run like
a console business. And that's it, right, And then we've
got you know, like mobile games, reading other people thinking

(02:15):
deeply about why they liked games and what it meant
to play them helped us grow into the kind of
people who turn a critical eye on everything, including our
beloved old game mags.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
It's not like we couldn't tell even as tweens and teens,
but along with all the stuff we loved, we were
also soaking our brains in blatant sexism, weird orientalism, and
capitalist brain rot. But now, as grown ups who get
paid to do this, it's shocking to be confronted with
just how much bad and weird stuff was often just
a page or a sentence away from the snappy, critical
writing we chose to carry with us.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Sigh next to falling nose deep into a pile of cheerleaders.
There is nothing I like better than a sprawling, complicated, gorgeous, funny,
well made RPG. And gosh darn it, if those folks
at Square didn't go ahead and send me one two
or three times a year, yeah, God, I'll love them.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
I had repressed, I gotta say, I had blocked out
that this is the lead of this and like rereading us, like, oh, yeah,
that's right, it does start there. Yeah, And I also
reading it now, I think we have a does a
dog wear pants like this or like this issue with
falling nose deep into a pile of cheerleaders, because I
think as a kid, I pictured like a leaf pile

(03:25):
and then like, okay, timber, and then you only hit
the surface and you only go nose deep.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
But it could also be are you picture jumping into a.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Pool of and then it goes weird? Right? Yeah, preposterous
on all levels.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Jeff's email, Yes, Jeff's email is in this issue. We
could ask him.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
I might, I will email Jsflkytom dot com. I will
do it right now.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
But we're also getting pleasantly surprised by how much hard
proof there is in these pages. The gaming and games
media was never just by or four guys.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Like coming to you from cross at Arkansas, Cody Bearden.
I'd like a pen pal eight to twelve who has
any s or sega. I want a boy, but a
girl is fine.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Guess a girl's fine.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
I'm sure Liz and Amanda and Jessica and Mindy and
Vivian and Crystal. I'm just reading apparently girls' names from
this big long list of pen pal like this looks
like basically a fifty to fifty gender split.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
That's what I wanted to talk about next. We do
look back at this and it does feel like a
magazine written for boys, but you get to this connection
section and the people looking, you know, to connect with
other people. There's about a fifty to fifty mix of
boys and girls.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
The Ultra Gameplayer's review actually called out Barrett's dialogue and
yeah the translation and going okay, he's like walking around
talking like mister t and like, yeah, wow, this dude
is like a stereotype, which again I was surprised Anne
pleased to see called out as working media pros who
are always on deadline for something. We can see all

(05:03):
the editorial scenes that we couldn't as kids who interviewed
Nolan Bushnell for this who wrote this? Because I think
you know, well, Aiden, you pitch an article to an
editor and you start doing the research and you realize
that the angle that you pitched ain't what it is.
It is not the reality, but you are trying to claw,

(05:27):
mold and bend reality into the shape of the story
that you wanted to tell. So there was a PSX
short for PlayStation Experience Magazine that had been running for
seventeen issues and then it was acquired by Sniff Davis
and Sony. They gave the original editor double the budget
and headcount and just slapped the official name on it

(05:47):
and relaunched in October nineteen ninety seven, one month after
PSM number one.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
I mean, okay, two thoughts here? Can we do more
of that? Can we double budget and headcount for magazines
and websites? Please? Like, let's go back to that. Critics
writing critique should never be worried about that, right, Like
they should never be worried if they want to give
a game an eight is that going to like cost
literally cost hundreds of people of thousand? Right?

Speaker 1 (06:13):
That should not be on that, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
That that should never be something that a critic has
to consider, right, But that is starting to get to
be the point. And then of course on the flip side,
it gainst weaponized by communities.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, well, I guess the good news now is critics
can say whatever they want because the team that created
is getting laid off either way. Right there you go,
it's just oh no, sorry of four star, five star,
one star, two star. Yeah, we're closing the studio. And
of course what kind of rude as the critics would
be if we didn't literally review the reviews.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
Eight out of ten Buster Story seven silver points out
of ten.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
This is ten out of ten. The cycling hat that
Wesley Snipes wears and white men can't jump.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Listen for the nostalgia, grubby little fingers flipping glossy magazine pages,
but subscribe for the way we tie everything back to
how we play, critique, and talk about games. In twenty
twenty five.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Our first season will cover the transition from the sixteen
bit generation to thirty two and sixty four bit consoles,
but all of our discussions will be informed by and
resonate with contemporary games and games journalism, and our guests,
interviews and bonus episodes will feature people and topics relevant
both then and now. You can follow the free feed
however you're listening to us right now, or just go

(07:27):
to Funfactor pod dot com for all the options Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whatever,
and join our community discord. You can also hit the
big button in the top right to become a member
of fun Factor Ultra, our premium tiers that unlock add
free episodes, bonus episodes, and the member's only channel of
our discord. Then help us spread the word shout us

(07:49):
out on Blue Sky or x at fun Factor Pod.
Tell friends past this show around like it's third grade.
We're not on the playground, and inside there's a blurry
photo of our projection TV in a crowded convention hall
that's allegedly showing footage from the sequel to your favorite
game ever. If you do, then every other Tuesday, you
and we will have a maximum score in fun Factor.

(08:12):
Remember fun Factor pod dot com.
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