The Official Blake Leftwich Video Game Blog

The last blog was about the Under the Radar (Games) Podcast logo I designed and created. This one is about the podcast itself.

THE ORIGIN OF THE UNDER THE RADAR (GAMES) PODCAST:
In the beginning there was Gamebot, a classic video game TV show my brother and I created back in '04. Gamebot was about reviewing classic games and covering classic game cons. We had a unique blend of dry humor and genuine (nerdy) love for the games and it was loved by the classic game community. It took many weeks to film and edit so episodes came out roughly every two months. The show aired on many stations along the east coast and we ended up releasing two DVDs and produced about 12 or so episodes. By 2007, due to my wanting to keep Gamebot alive even though I had no time to do so, the show had transitioned to a website to a blog to a forum to a podcast. The podcast was called Gamebot Live and was hosted by myself and my good friend Matt Taylor and occasionally, childhood pal Stephen Smith.

The Gamebot Live podcast, the last incarnation of Gamebot, was a lot of work. I had lots of ideas for the show, different segments, sound effects, transitions, guests. At the end of the day it was very time consuming to record and edit and became too expensive to host. Plus, there were other classic game podcasts out there doing a much better job (Retrocity-R.I.P). Episode 14-the last episode-aired in mid '08.

Roughly a year passed and I really wanted to do a new podcast about games. Matt and I tossed around lots of ideas and eventually came up with the following guidelines:

The show has to cost nothing, take little time, be more fun than work, come out every week, be about current games (not classic) and have one solid concept that works instead of a bunch of segments.

We came up with the idea of reviewing under the radar games because no one else was covering them and I tend to enjoy diamonds in the rough. I wanted to keep the method (from Gamebot) of playing games for the first time live. This creates a fresh opinion. I eventually created the outline that we have stuck with.

THE SHOW OUTLINE
1) Talk about our expectations for what the game will be like (or what we hope it is like). I wanted to do this because I believe this is an important stage of experiencing a game. I imagine what the game will play like and often have high expectations. That's why gamers are often disappointed when the game doesn't live up. Everybody daydreams about games before they play them, consciously or not. This is why cover art and screenshots are so important-they spark the imagination.

2) Play it for just enough time to get a first impression. Everyone knows that your first instinct is usually correct. We set a strict time limit of ten minutes with a game not including cutscenes, credits, etc. This time limit has softened over time. We will play as long as we need to try out the elements we want to understand. We often take notes too.

3) Spend more time with it for a final analysis. We discovered eventually that the 3rd step (the "long haul") was not necessary but we still do it from time to time.

NOT NECESSARY?!
Yes, the goal is to inform, not persuade. The first impression gives enough info to whet the listeners appetite. It is up to the individual to decide if a game is for them or not.

Matt and I also decided that sometimes we like to talk about the state of the industry and current news stories, and that our discussions can be very colorful-so why not put them in the show? We tagged an optional "overtime" segment at the end of the show. This was designed to be shut off if the listener didn't care. The discussions however became some of the most memorable and entertaining parts of the show and therefore became a standard feature.

We also occasionally include "minute musts", one minute rants about games that are must-play. This was a segment I came up with. I like segments. Old habits die hard.

The best thing about the overtime segment is that we can do what we want with it. Sometimes we read letters, sometimes we talk about news, we do whatever works that week.

OUTTAKES
Matt is great at finding outtakes and popping them on the very end of the show. These outtakes became discussions about what we are up to, another optional segment. Sometimes it's a single funny outtake, sometimes its a ten minute discussion about what we're playing.

ABOUT THE NAME
When Matt and I were searching our souls for the perfect name. Now frequent guest and devil's advocate James Tillman suggested "Why don't you just call it Under the Radar?" We were dumbstruck! The capper was when Matt suggested mailtheradar@gmail.com as the email address and Evan Jackson, another good friend, recommended that we name our twitter account tweettherradar. You get the gist-it became a nice theme. I whipped up the podcast logo and we were ready to rock but we recieved an email right after our first post about the show from another podcast called, you guessed it, Under the Radar Games. They asked us to change the name but they had just started too and we decided we had as much right to the name as they did. We said no. Our doppelganger is still out there in internet land somewhere coexisting. They are based in jolly old England anyway.

TECHNICAL STUFF
We found a way to host the show mp3s and create the feed for free through some creative researching. The feed xml itself is hosted at the salute games website (see below for a link). All editing is done by the cohost Matt Taylor. He is awesome and makes the show 10x better than it is. He uses Audacity and we record with Skype.

That's the story. If you want to hear the show you can get it on iTunes or directly from the feed at www.salutegames.com/utr. Contact us at mailtheradar@gmail.com and follow us on twitter at twitter.com/tweettheradar.

Feedback appreciated!