My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

Evan Narcisse is an American writer, journalist, and narrative designer whose work spans comics, criticism, and video games. After graduating from New York University, he began his career as a culture and technology journalist, writing for outlets including Time, Kotaku, and The Atlantic, where he explored the intersection of race, identity, and storytelling in popular media.

He left journalism to become a writer for Marvel Comics, and there helped redefine a cultural icon with Rise of the Black Panther. As a narrative designer he has contributed to several major video game projects, including Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Redfall, and Black Panther. Now, as a senior writer for Brass Lion Entertainment, he’s working on a new action title from the Wu-Tang Clan. Across mediums, his work combines sharp insight with deep empathy, expanding how, and for whom, stories are told.

Recorded live at the University of Chicago.

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Ed Atkins is a British contemporary artist known for his haunting, hyperreal digital videos—works that combine computer-generated bodies, poetic monologues, and a profound sense of longing, absurdity, and decay. Since the early 2010s, his art has been exhibited at major institutions around the world, including Tate Britain and MoMA, and he’s taken part in various festivals, including the Venice Biennale, the Holland Festival, and Manchester International Festival.

He’s also written a series of books of poetry and memoir, most recently ‘Flower’, which he describes as an anti-memoir. Working across video, text, and performance, he often explores what it means to be human in an age of simulation and screens, where flesh, feeling, and code are increasingly intertwined.
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Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025
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Tom Keegan is one of the leading performance directors in video games, whose career spans theatre, film, animation, and interactive entertainment. After starting out in the New York theatre scene, he worked in animation on Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, and The Woody Woodpecker Show, then moved into video games at a pivotal moment in the industry’s evolution.

For the past two decades he has shaped performances for Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Battlefield, Resident Evil 2, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. BAFTA-nominated for his work on Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, he now shares his experience in his new book The Complete Guide to Videogame Performance Directing.
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Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025
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Keza Macdonald is a Scottish journalist and editor who has spent more than two decades chronicling the culture and business of video games. She started early, as a junior staff writer for GamesTM while she was still a teenager. Then, after earning a degree in German and Japanese from the University of Edinburgh—including a year studying in Japan—she became UK Games Editor at IGN, helping shape the site’s global editorial strategy.

She then launched and led Kotaku UK, where her team won multiple industry awards. Since 2018 she has been Games Editor at The Guardian, where she writes the widely read “Pushing Buttons” newsletter and appears regularly on television and radio as an expert on the medium. She is the co-author of You Died: The Dark Souls Companion, and her new book, Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, explores the cultural impact of one of gaming’s most influential companies.
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Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025
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My guest today is a video game executive whose career spans the medium’s earliest home computers to the rise of the modern console business. He created his first games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s, before joining Microsoft in 1986, where he spent a decade as an early developer on Excel and Word.

In 1996, he left the Office team to pursue his passion for games, founding Microsoft Game Studios and laying the groundwork for the company’s entry into interactive entertainment. Over the next eight years, he grew the division from fifty people to more than twelve hundred, publishing over a hundred games—including more than a dozen million-sellers—and co-founding the original Xbox project.

Since retiring from Microsoft in 2004, he has worked as an advisor, board member, and investor, and in 2019 helped launch 1Up Ventures, a fund dedicated to supporting independent game developers around the world.
Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole

Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.