Episode 715: Sega Game Tapes / 3D: Faking It 'Til You Make It (Patreon)

Jeremy: A few weeks ago, a bunch of us descended upon Garden City, Long Island, New York, United States of America to do what we do best: talk about old stuff. For this bonus episode, I've pulled my recordings of the two panels that I led to allow those of you who were not able to attend the convention (which, numerically speaking, is MOST of you) to hear our banter and insightful historic commentary. But mostly our banter.

The topics this time around were somewhat closely related! As a sort of side conversation tied to my efforts to post VHS and LaserDisc rips of old video tapes about video games on my personal YouTube channel, I showed off a bunch of Sega-related tapes from the ’80s (and maybe one or two from the ’90s) with the help of Stuart. Then, for the proper Retronauts presentation, Diamond, Stuart, Kevin, and I dug into the evolution of fake 3D visuals throughout video game history.

Now, these are clearly topics that lend themselves to a strong visual component. And we delivered! After all, the Long Island convention main theater is a planetarium IMAX screen... how could we not? If nothing else, I wanted to see what would happen if a room full of people saw Super Scaler footage at theatrical size. You can't see the visual elements in this podcast, but you can click on the #lirgelive tag in the sidebar to reveal two complementary video posts if you would prefer to watch these conversations rather than simply listen to them! But I do think the banter holds up reasonably well to the audio-only format. Our brains developed imaginations precisely for moments like this.

Art by Nick Wanserski

• Not much music here, since it's a live recording, but you may recognize the Sega interstitial jams...