Thursday, March 7, 2013

A New Era of Journalism

As anyone who will listen to me for more than five seconds knows, I have a podcast. Inspired by +Ryan Rampersad and +Matthew Petschl's show At The Nexus +Ian Decker and I hatched the idea to start a weekly video game show. And so Eight Bit was born.

We recorded our first episode almost exactly six months ago, and so far we haven't missed a week. We've also managed to have guests on the show for most of the episodes. All of the guests to date have been friends of ours, and we usually brought them on to review games that neither of us had played.

Imagine our surprise when we get this email:
Hi! I was told I should get in touch with you about potentially talking about our new project, Net Gain: Corporate Espionage.
If you'd like to check up on it, you can see our popular Kickstarter here: http://kck.st/ZK6OR3

Thank you!

~John Gosling
 My initial reaction was "There is no way this is real. No way a real developer heard about us. Did one of our listeners tell them about us? No way."
But lo, the Kickstarter looks legitimate, and his email address is in the @levelzerogames.com domain. They even have a few games that they have already made! So I had to come to terms with the fact that a real Indy developer wanted to be on our show. Now how did he hear about us?

I started snooping around the Kickstarter page, and after determining that the game sounds worth it, I backed it. Then I looked at the list of other backers. One profile picture jumped out at me. +Chris Thompson was one of the backers! Chris is one of the hosts of Control Structure, the Computer Science-themed show on the network.

Long story short, Chris had contacted John about being on Control Structure, and John found out about our show. Since ours is the gaming show he wants to be on our show to talk about the game, and he will also be on Control Structure to talk about some other topic.

I am super excited about this opportunity, and I am still a little flabbergasted that it just fell into our lap the way it did. John is scheduled to appear on our show on March 17th, so look for that episode on the website right after St. Patrick's Day.