KGB / Conspiracy – PA129

KGB or Conspiracy is a 1992 game developed by Cryo Interactive Entertainment and published by Virgin Games for DOS and Amiga. KGB is a 1st person point and click adventure where you play as Maksim Rukov, an agent transferred to Department P and ordered to investigate possible corruption in the KGB after a former agent turns up dead.  It’s a challenging race against time that takes places in the gloomy final days of the Soviet Union.

The core soundtrack for DOS was composed by Stéphane Picq, with an original track and porting to Amiga handled by Alexandre Ekian. The music is a mix of moody electronic ambience and energetic melodic flourishes and features some of the best use of the Adlib (OPL2) soundchip from that era thanks to the custom HERAD music system by programmer and Cryo co-founder Remi Herbulot.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:21 — 126.8MB)

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Psycho World – PA128

Today we’re covering Psycho World, released for the MSX in 1988 and localized as Psychic World for the Sega Master System and Game Gear in 1991. The original MSX release was developed and published by Hertz, a short-lived Japanese game developer that also worked on number of ports with their final game being Vay for the Mega CD. The SMS and Game Gear ports of Psychic World were done through a partnership with SIMS and published by Sega.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:04 — 84.5MB)

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Early Game Music with They Create Worlds – PA127


We once again return to the earliest days of game sound and music and trace the evolution from 1977 through 1984 in this historically focused episode. We go from the arcade boom, to early home consoles and computers, to the video game crash, and end just before the rise of the NES. The show is a much deeper dive on historical context, although we cover a lot more music in the second half.

We were very pleased to collaborate with special guests Alex Smith and Jeff Daum of They Create Worlds, a podcast, blog and book that focuses on getting nuanced and often untold stories from the game industry, with an emphasis on the lesser talked about business side of things. Their show does a fantastic job of capturing engaging context on everything from game genres, mega hits like Space Invaders and Tetris, to the founding of individual companies.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:53:34 — 166.2MB)

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Kaze no NOTAM with Hammock – PA126

What does it feel like to soar through the skies in a hot air balloon? Kaze no Notam on the Sony Playstation attempts to answer that question. Released September 1997 by the mid-sized Japanese developer Artdink, Kaze no Notam is an easygoing flight sim in the vein of Pilotwings with some light objectives, although it’s more tech demo than game.

The composer for the game is Ryuuji Nishida who also worked on a number of projects for Artdink like ‘No One Can Stop Mr. Domino’, Zeus II Carnage Heart, A-Train DS, and Sword Art Online: Lost Song. He’s an accomplished composer and has been at Artdink for over 20 years and is currently the head of their sound department.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:25:47 — 118.8MB)

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Harald Hårdtand: Kampen om de rene tænder – PA125

Harald Hårdtand: Kampen om de rene tænder (or Harold Hardtooth in The Fight for Clean Teeth) or simply “Colgate” for short, is an advergame platformer released in 1992 for the C64, Amiga and DOS. The game was developed by SilverRock Productions, a Copenhagen-based Danish company founded in 1988 and renamed in 1992 to Interactive Television Entertainment (ITE), best known for developing and producing the Hugo the Troll media franchise.

The soundtrack is short and sweet with only 3 tracks, or 4 if you count the unused title theme. The music was originally composed on C64 by Thomas Mogensen, a.k.a. (DRAX) of the demoscene group Vibrants. Additional support for sound effects and music for all three platforms was handled by Jens-Christian Huus (JCH) and Jesper Olsen (JO) of Vibrants, and Thomas Engel. Join us as we dive into the music of an advergame for the first but probably not last time.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:07 — 46.0MB)

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Alex the Allegator 4 with Anders Svensson – PA124

Alex the Allegator 4 (aka Alex 4) is a freeware platformer released for PC, Mac, Linux and BeOS in 2003 by Free Lunch Design. Free Lunch Design was a small indie developer based in Gothenburg, Sweden, best known for their game Icy Tower. The company was started in 1998 by Johan Peitz with the goal of creating fun, high quality games with a focus on gameplay.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:49 — 86.8MB)

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