Even before COVID-19 reshaped the circumstances around our society, I listened to podcasts more than music. Podcasts are a great way to get through the day while learning about new and exciting developments in various fields and disciplines—including, yes, videogames. If you’re looking for recommendations, here are the handful that I think are the best videogame podcasts around right now. You should be aware going in that some of these podcasts skew left-of-center to far-left politically, even if not overtly. I make no apologies for that; just wanted you to know the “keep politics out of games” podcast list is on some other site from some other writer. I am very interested in recommendations and not at all interested in arguments.
Waypoint Radio
Waypoint Radio is Vice’s games podcast, and one of my favorite podcasts, period. It is one of the two I am usually talking about when I tell my friends “I heard about [game/concept/news event/sociopolitical movement] on a leftist podcast.” It’s simply one of the best around.
With longtime co-host Austin Walker recently departing to new game developer Possibility Space, Waypoint Radio is now hosted by Rob Zacny, Patrick Klepek, and producer Ricardo Contreras, and frequently featuring Natalie Watson, with rotating appearances by Vice Motherboard writer Gita Jackson. They’ve also featured such guests as Matthew Gault (Motherboard/Angry Planet). (Jackson is a former assistant editor at Paste, and Walker and Zacny have both written for Paste, but none of them have worked with the author of this piece.—Ed.)
Despite what the podcast page on the actual Vice website will tell you, Waypoint didn’t stop updating in July. In fact, in addition to their regular twice weekly podcasts (which release on Tuesday and Friday), this summer they launched Waypoint Plus, which gives subscribers access to bonus content like special episodes, including Waypoint After Dark, gaming deep-dives, an ongoing series on Michael Mann movies, and an ongoing series on the catalog of games and films adapted from the novel Roadside Picnic.
No Cartridge Audio
No Cartridge Audio is another eclectic podcast mainly focused on games analysis through a leftist lens, and one I’m always delighted to see appear with a new episode in my Spotify or Patreon feed. Host Trevor Strunk covers videogames and videogame news on “Patch Notes” with cohost Jonathan Bernhardt, whose writing on Mass Effect: Andromeda convinced me to download that off Game Pass. English Ph.D. Strunk also covers anime with cohost Andrew “Piss” in “No Wallscroll,” and was for a while pairing books with videogames in “GG No Reread.” Myriad patreon mini-projects have come and gone, like breaking down Marx’s Capital and going through the detective show Homicide.
He has frequent contributors like Sean McTiernan, who came on a patreon episode this summer to deconstruct the concept of nerdcore rap, and recurring guests like games writer (and Paste contributor) Dia Lacina, Marc Normandin (labor politics and RetroXP), and guests from podcasts as disparate as Chapo Trap House and Shutdown Fullcast.
What sets No Cartridge Audio apart is the way Trevor’s personality and politics allow the conversations and interviews to flow effortlessly and smoothly. It’s like when you have a teacher or mentor that tells you something as if you already know it, without making you feel stupid for not knowing it. Except that Trevor Strunk and his guests are all the professors, all witty and fun and irreverent while talking seriously about videogames.
1Upsmanship
Mayhaps you’ve heard of Cracked.com. Between 2017 and 2019, they hemorrhaged a lot of talent. They still have—and, so, periodically lose—great comedy writers. Some of those great comedy writers do shows together as part of the Small Beans group. Small Beans has multiple podcasts on movies, some current events and personal interest podcasts, a Coen Brothers movie show and a Stephen King movies show, and—my personal favorite—1Upsmanship, where writer/IGN editor Michael Swaim and director/film instructor Adam Ganser analyze new and old videogames to try to pick the best 100 or 200 that you would show aliens to demonstrate the art form. They structure the episodes through a series of segments, starting with a ‘speedrun’ where one of the hosts or guests summarizes the game, before each host and guest gets to do a “Player 1/2/3” rant, then “Game On” where they debate the games, concluding with “Keep or Delete,” where they decide if the game deserves to be part of the gaming canon.
The natural contrasts in the ways that the hosts interpret the purpose of games makes for interesting engagement. Swaim bends more toward concept and story, where Ganser trends slightly more toward form and function, but that might be oversimplifying. I’ve listened multiple times to their episodes on the Fallout games, the Red Dead Redemption games, and Skyrim. It’s always a joy when they’ve got guests like IGN’s Max Scoville, or Tom Reimann of Gamefully Unemployed and Collider.
Bonus: you can find other interesting artistic analysis at Small Beans’ sibling channel Gamefully Unemployed (with whom they share a series called Star Trek: The Next Futurama) and their sibling channel Unpopular Opinion/The Unpops Network
Glass House Games
I’ve only started listening to this podcast relatively recently, but it’s already become one of my favorites. It’s based in East London’s Brick Lane with a rotating cast of Shay Thompson, Samantha Greer, Alex CG, Astrid Johnson, Mat Jones, Kit Critchley, and Alex P. They’ve got great intro and outro music and do new podcasts, videos, and livestreams every week. The review podcasts get shortened for their regular podcatcher releases, but are available in longer form on Patreon. The episode which sold me on this show is titled ”Wholesome games are violent too” ; it’s an excavation of the idea of wholesomeness that explores the ways social construct scenes like “cottagecore” are sometimes used to smuggle violently reactionary viewpoints into the mainstream.
GamesIndustry.Biz Podcast
As you can tell from the name, this podcast owes its existence to GamesIndustry.Biz, a trade publication that takes a very serious look at the labor and economic news of the videogame industry. As such, their perspective is largely geared more to insiders than consumers, but it isn’t insular; it’s instructive. Like Glass House, it’s largely based in Britain. Some of the episodes I’ve found most compelling include their work on Six Days in Felujah, their coverage of FIFA Ultimate Team, and a recent episode on transphobia in GTA. It’s a very good news and commentary show that also features E3 and game-of-the-year reviews and interviews with game developers like Brenda Romero and Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart.
How Did This Get Played?
Hosted by Heather Anne Campbell, Nick Wiger, and producer Matt Apadoca, How Did This Get Played? is more of a comedy podcast than any other on this list, but no less insightful for that. Formed in June 2019 as a younger sibling podcast to Earwolf’s How Did This Get Made? podcast about bad movies, How Did This Get Played? focuses on the worst and weirdest games around. Luckily that latter descriptor has allowed them to engage with things like Katamari Damacy, Yakuza 0 and Death’s Stranding, so it’s not all just scraping the barrel.
Campbell, Wiger, and Apadoca also started doing a series called 70 Minutes in Gaming Heaven where they talk about all the things they’re enjoying playing regularly to break up the experience of living in ‘gaming hell’ with games like Duke Nukem Forever or Postal. They also do general episodes around concepts in the world of videogames like backlog and first person shooters, and have run series on the Mario games and some of Kojima’s work. One thing you should be aware of is that, as an Earwolf podcast, they archive some of their older stuff, which you can also read about on their surprisingly extensive Wikipedia entry.