Episode: 2059
Title: HPR2059: More Tech, Less Magic
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2059/hpr2059.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:49:20

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This is HPR episode 2059 titled MOTEC, Less Magic.
It is posted by first time post on Mitchell and is about 17 minutes long.
The summary is MOTEC, Less Magic.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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Hey everybody, my name is Todd Mitchell.
This is my first contribution to HPR.
I'm an independent game developer as well as a freelance game industry journalist.
I used to be a professional software engineer at a major industrial engineering firm, but
more recently I left all that behind to work independently and take care of my son.
I thought it might be interesting to talk a little bit about technology today, and
how it's changing life, especially childhood, for better and for worse.
This is especially true if you're a gamer, but I'm going to try to tie this into things
you can relate to even if you aren't into video games.
My son still isn't quite two years old, but he's already getting interested in playing
video games.
I don't sit at the Xbox for hours in front of him or bury myself in Tetris on the phone,
but Daddy works with video games.
Our house definitely reflects that.
There's an Xbox 360, the living room cable box.
There's an Xbox One, a Wii U on my office desk.
I have steam on my dual booted MacBook Pro with hundreds of games in the library.
Let alone the vintage equipment in the basement.
I've taken a part of USB Super Nintendo style controller to cut the cord out from the
inside, then reassemble it and give it to my son to play with.
He understands controllers and touch screens and exploding sound effects and he wants
in.
When we decide we're ready, that's really no problem.
Think of how easy it is to grow up a gamer now.
On Thanksgiving Day, we took advantage of an Amazon sale and bought my son a fire tablet
for well under 50 bucks.
We bought a big kidproof case for it and I figured I would find some baby friendly number
and letter type software for him or even create some of my own.
Even thinking about that turned out to be a waste of time.
As soon as I powered the thing up, it offered me a dirt cheap subscription to what's called
the free time service and this is a huge collection of books and movies and apps that your
kid can play for as long as you let them with no extra charge.
It's heavily curated, there are no in-app purchases and it includes some games I've actually
had my eye on like the Duck Tales remake I got to play that for the first time.
If it weren't for this, the iOS and Google Play stores alone have enough free educational
games that a kid couldn't try them all in his entire lifetime.
Kids can get online and find new games and learn how to win the ones they're playing
and if they're brave enough, they can learn how to make games on their own.
Think about that, kids for free with the devices they play can learn how to make games
on those very same screens.
Think of how crazy that is if you ever tried to teach yourself game development in years
past.
There's nothing a kid can't get at the push of a button now.
But I think something is missing and it definitely isn't coming back.
I don't remember the very first video game I ever played.
It might have been Pac-Man or something on the Atari.
I remember once my dad spent hours punching a program into his Commodore 64 to get this
graphics demo to run on it.
He told me to come see it and I lost my mind.
I asked him if I could play with it and his expression immediately changed and he more
less told me to fuck off.
I never once touched that computer, but that's beside the point.
Eventually my mom passed me down her Atari and I think she had most of the games for it
and I later found out that several of her brothers and sisters also had their own Atari's.
It was a weird detail about a family who was otherwise notoriously broke throughout history,
but there they were playing missile command and breakout.
But there I was with my Atari.
This was probably 91 or 92.
It was already pretty late for the Atari, but it was getting me through some pretty weird
stuff.
There was turmoil when my dad's career took some weird turns and caused issues between
my parents.
There was tension when religious topics came up that they didn't agree on.
There was loneliness when my dad moved us from town to town for different jobs.
It got a hold, sure, but I understood gaming.
I had control over it and that became very important to me.
Not long after that, my mom scored me an Nintendo Entertainment System.
Mario Duck Hunt, the Red Zapper, the Works.
I found out it wasn't possible for a kid to get so excited that he burst into flames
because I would have.
The initial shock of owning an NES took a long time to wear off, but if most of the Atari
collection eventually got old, you can imagine how the original Super Mario Bros. eventually
left me wondering, what else is out there?
I started kind of asking about game stores, I figured that was a thing, and I got reminded
that we're broke.
I asked my parents, what am I supposed to do?
And my mom suggested that I start joining her and my grandmother for yard sales early
each Saturday.
And I did.
So a few bucks at a time, I bought my way into this huge collection of NES games.
I was selling them and trading them at our own yard sales, and I played my brains out
on all these games.
I played Contra and Kiddickress, blades of steel, base wars.
I played games that I didn't have the right peripherals for like gyramite with the robot
operating buddy Rob.
I played games that wouldn't make sense to me for years, like Mule, the old strategy
game with the robot Mules.
One time I bought a power glove and realized when I got home that the plug didn't fit the
system at all, I still have no idea why.
I cut the cord off and I ran around with it on my hand just to be cool.
You have to understand there were live action commercials and cartoons at this time that
exhibited this behavior.
So I had the versatile know-how of Captain In without the letter jacket or the good hair.
When my dad took off, I spent most of my time with my grandparents.
This was a blessing that wasn't really in disguise.
They lived in a nice neighborhood and they took an interest in my sister and I.
And I got to settle in at a middle of the road public school district and meet a few friends
in my neighborhood.
I had the NES kids.
The kid across the street had the Sega and a friend down the hill had the Super Nintendo.
We left no game unplayed.
Even though I'd only bought one new game in a store in my entire life and my dad convinced
me to rebuy Pac-Man because he wanted to try it on the NES before he hit the roads
of thanks.
I was getting with friends to try NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat and Earthworm Gym and Sonic,
Super Mario All-Stars, all the Capcom Disney games.
When we weren't mashing buttons, we were reading every industry magazine one of our parents
would let us buy.
And trading stories about a kid who knows a guy who knows a dude who unlocked Shack and
NBA Jam by doing an on-fire dunk and breaking the backboard from half court which I managed
to recreate twice before declaring bullshit.
And let's talk about video rental stores.
This was a time when Blockbuster held nationwide video game tournaments that every kid in America
was pretty sure they could win.
I know most of us tried.
If we weren't competing, we were walking up on Tuesdays to grab new releases and we
were back to try to grab them again at the end of the rental period on Saturday.
If the right manager was in, we could dig through the return slot pile by the door.
I don't know if there's a schnook grocery store where you are but whatever you're drinking
right now, pour just a little bit out in a remembrance of the cheapest video game rentals
in history.
To this date, I'm not sure if that corporate office realized what video games even were.
This was in addition to arcades and the arcade cabinets that still made noise in Walmart
and Pizza Hut all over the world.
My grandpa fed me more money in quarters on that old Avengers game than I think he spent
on his entire shopping list one time.
This was unusual too but I think he got something out of seeing me that excited and it worked.
I never forgot that.
That's not my big arcade story and I wanted to save this for a book one day but it would
be a lot easier to blurt it into this microphone.
So here we go.
There was a time when my mom dragged me several times a week to this penny-costal church and
I say church in air quotes because they met at a holiday end.
I was 12 years old at the time and I actually met my future wife there but that's not
what this particular story is about.
Sorry, hun.
I had this sort of troublesome friend at the church who did a lot of roaming around at
this huge hotel and he pulls me out of a service one day and says, check this out.
He walks me down a few hallways into a huge indoor pool area with this really nice micro-arcades
set up at it and my brain exploded.
Suddenly, we're sneaking out of church services to hit the pool and play Mortal Kombat.
At this day, the smell of chlorine makes me think about playing Mortal Kombat, which
is a funny thing.
That all ended when they paused a youth group service one night because we, quote, went missing.
They figured it out and we were in deep shit but those memories are priceless.
And that's just it.
Video games were these magical elusive creatures at that time.
And now I'm looking at a zip archive on a download site right now.
It's about 10 gigs.
You could fit it on a flash drive.
You know what's on it?
Every game I just talked about, the entire NES, SNES, and Genesis libraries.
The entire arcade library up to 2,000 or so would not be much bigger.
And legal issues aside, it's just sitting out there for whoever.
My son doesn't just have unlimited choices from the modern age, he's got my entire past,
my whole childhood at his fingertips.
And he'll probably never look at it.
But he's never going to feel the sense of wonder about it.
The thrill of tracking down that hard to find game, he'll never swap games with a buddy
down the street.
He won't share urban legends about a confusing game with somebody at school.
He'll play whatever he wants growing up and it won't really mean anything to him.
What else works this way?
I'm sure you've thought of something by now.
I also like video editing and trying to animate little cartoons even though I'm a horrible
artist.
This didn't work as well before YouTube and all the free video hosting sites while we
were wrestling with flash and weird JavaScript loaders and stuff back then.
I could name more, but ultimately I hope you'll look around at your passion projects.
The software, the hardware, whatever you're loving and cursing all at the same time and
think about it when you wake up and drift off wondering about how you're going to fix
it in the morning and just take a minute to appreciate that.
To think of how far gone it's going to be in 10 or 20 years, and how foreign it's going
to seem to your kid or their kid, you'll marvel at that technology.
But you might just miss that magic.
So that story wasn't intended to be a downer.
I think maybe it probably came out that way.
So let me finish off by telling you about something kind of nice, kind of uplifting I experienced
today.
I was on Twitter.
I know you guys have different feelings about that.
I'm sure I have different feelings within my own self about Twitter, but that's where
I was today.
I see somebody reshare somebody's tweet that said, oh man, five followers away from 1000.
And I noticed this is a game studio account or at least one user who develops games.
So as a developer myself and with a little bit of a following, I followed him and said,
yeah, here I am for a way and joked around.
I said, oh yeah, I'll unfollow.
Now you're five away again.
I'm just kidding.
But then as a, just a gesture of goodwill, I reshare it on my account and said, hey,
what can we do for this guy?
And he actually ended up hitting his, his goal of 1000 followers later that day based
on, I think probably four of my friends.
Any, he private messages me says, thanks so much, man, I really appreciate that.
And I said, hey, you caught me at the right time and tell me what are you working on?
Is it something cool?
Let me know.
Yeah, I'm working on this first person horror game, scary movie style, that kind of thing.
I said, okay, that's cool.
I used to run a blog with a buddy who's a huge horror fan, shout out to my buddy, Ray,
if you're listening.
And he says, would you like to see the trailer for this thing?
And I said, oh, you got a trailer?
Yeah, let's, let's see your trailer.
He shows it to me and it looks decent.
It looks like sort of a PlayStation era resident evil type thing with sort of an interesting
story started.
There wasn't much to it in terms of what the gameplay is going to look like, stuff like
that, but it's coming along.
And I said, hey, man, it looks great.
You know, congratulations on this.
And he says, thanks so much.
You know, it's hard, it's hard doing the programming and the, you know, this and that.
It's really tricky.
And I said, yeah, I know, man, ever, ever since I got started, this stuff is just ninja
magic that you learn.
And it's, it's awesome.
Once you know what goes into these projects and he said something like, yeah, man, not,
you know, not bad for my first year out of high school.
And I was, I was just blown away because for all the changes we've had and as hard as
I worked to get into game development myself, he's further along than I am to this day.
I'm, I'm 30 years old.
And one year after high school, he's really close to the, to going on steam green light
and trying to get his project through into the store.
And it's awesome.
It's awesome that these changes have made it so readily possible for a young person like
that to pursue their dream.
Now I don't know what else he's doing.
He's probably working full time or attending college, whatever the case may be.
But man, you know, it's all worth it.
If, if the changes that, that we've made have made it this, this much easier for people
to pursue their passion projects, whatever they are.
And I know you guys have different stories about I taught myself programming.
I got in networking.
You know, I've been hacking around with this and that and you know, learned electronics
and things like that.
And it's so impressive that every bit of this stuff is worth it.
That's all I got.
Thank you guys so much for listening.
This was a lot of fun.
I would really consider doing this again if you guys enjoy it.
Feel free to flow to topic to me if it's related to what you've heard today or what
you've heard about my background.
If you have interest, you can follow me on Twitter at mechatodzilla with 1D, 2Ls.
You can follow my professional blog at coderightplay.com.
And I'm always happy to interact with you guys.
I'm not hard to get a hold of because this is my job.
And I also contribute to a couple of other podcasts.
My friends over at sadpod, S-A-H-D pod, dot com, stay at home, dad, a great group of
guys sort of a collective that puts out different shows.
So check them out, give them a listen.
My buddies and I at OHC play, which you can find through coderightplay.com will be playing
new games every once in a while, new or old games that we want to play, talk about the news
of the day in the game industry and play around and have a good time.
So thanks again so much everybody and stay tuned for more shows from Hacker Public Radio.
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