Resurrecting Classic Gaming Podcasts
Over the last few months, I got back into the habit of listening to podcasts for the first time since I had a three-hour daily commute around 2007. I realised that — not surprisingly, after twenty years of podcasting — some of the shows that were a big deal back in the day hadn’t just ended long ago, but had since lost their hosting and disappeared from catalogues entirely.
In many cases, some superstar had saved the mp3 files and uploaded them to archive.org. Which is brilliant! But I wanted to enjoy them in the same way I could any other podcast: on my phone, in a podcast app with an interface that shows episodes in chronological order and convenient features like position saving and silence trimming. And there was no easy way to do that.
It’s not for lack of the audio; the thing stopping us is that we don’t have a feed. But that’s a solvable problem! We just have to find an archived copy of each feed and update them to point to the new permalinks of the mp3s on archive.org.
Well, it ended up being quite a bit more complicated than that. But now, I’ve created complete feeds for three historic podcasts: the original 1UP run of Retronauts, GameSpot’s news show The HotSpot, and This Year, a podcast of multi-hour edits of the highlights of other shows, including many that are games-related. You can subscribe to them right now in any podcatcher that lets you add a URL: the feeds contain the original dates, full descriptions and new, high resolution cover art, and behave the same as any other podcast feed.
There are over 1,400 hours of entertainment here. Nobody will ever get through more than a fraction. But in making these podcasts more accessible, I hope more people will be able to appreciate these time capsules of history.
There's more information about each podcast on the feed collection page, and more podcasts will be added over time:
