Idle Thumbs Kickstarter Progresscast

In this, the final Progresscast we talk about our plans for the site, the blog, our appearance at PAX and QuakeCon, and a bunch of video games; Jake has a spell; and we reminisce about the career of an American treasure.

Did you know you can play a game of Civ V: Gods & Kings with a slow enough clock and a big enough map that it replaces real life? Also discussed: What happened to sim games as hardware got better: A lament for Super Black Bass, Sports Games versus eSports Games, combo breakers and sick half-nelsons.

Chris has started progressing through Civilization V: Gods & Kings, and we discuss his progress in this Progresscast. There's some Kickstarter news in it, too.

Two thousand years in the future, the world has collapsed into a nightmare of destruction and despair. Only Idle Thumbs remains. We won't take so long next time. In the meantime, wander through the wasteland with us as we discuss video games, the web, and progress.

The Progresscast goes one-time, rule-breakingly meta, as we discuss recent events in our own day jobs. Sean and Jake talk about The Walking Dead, Chris talks about his new digs at Double Fine Productions, and we're joined by special guest Steve Gaynor to talk about his new endeavor The Fullbright Company and their game, Gone Home.

The contents of this episode have been lost to time. You'll have to listen to it to find out what secrets it contains.

If our podcast drove off a cliff with wild abandon, some wheels off, and possibly on fire, would you follow? We can only hope so, as the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter Progresscast: The Tenth One is fast approaching.

Without a lot of concrete Kickstarter news for you, we fall back on old habits and decide to talk about games for the entirely of this week's Progresscast. We hope you don't mind.

Join us, readers, for this public Progresscast as we descend into the dark bowels of Minecraft servers and secret holes, only to find the quietest place in the world. (That place is absolutely guaranteed not to be the Idle Thumbs office in its current state.) You would do well to read this fascinating article on a particularly silent room before listening to this cast, as we entirely neglected to explain what it's actually about before launching into a related discussion.

Darkness engulfs you and beetles skitter across the dank, putrid walls as your sanity erodes. All is lost. You despair. Your grasp on reality finally slips, and in your final shreds of lucidity you hear a group of voices echo in the darkness. ".....I'm Chris Remo........I'm Jake Rodkin.......and I'm Sean Vanaman......" It's just us. Sorry about that. We picked up the keys to our new office today, and as it is currently an entirely empty rectangular prism, it is also something of an echo chamber. We'll get those beetles swept up shortly. This Progresscast features Sean's attemps to return to Frictional's excellent Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Jake's determination never to return to San Francisco's enigmatic Golden Gate Park, and Chris also talking about those things. For the second half of the show, step into the wayback machine and travel with Sean to Los Angeles, where he discusses Thirty Flights of Loving with creator Brendon Chung.

In the final hours of our Kickstarter campaign, enjoy this unusually progress-oriented Idle Thumbs Progresscast. Much news is discussed, most crucially our upcoming partnership with the strategy game podcast Three Moves Ahead. Read our announcement and check out their website. We're excited. Also enjoy our potentially-disastrous End-of-Campaign Livestream, to be hosted by Twitch.tv and produced by Twitch.tv's own TheGunRun. We're hoping to kick off around 6pm Pacific Daylight Time over on our streaming site. It'll run until 8pm or so. Expect video games. And maybe other things. Until then, please sample our cast pod.

GDC came and went and in its frothy wash we found our Kickstarter cresting 400%. We continue to be dumbfounded and ever grateful. There really are no words, dear reader. There are only sirens. For those who were in town for the Game Developers Conference, we hosted a small rooftop BBQ which yielded a brief Idle Thumbs Mega-Cast. Herein you will find a a momentous Ides of March Progresscast, featuring the largest grouping of Thumbs ever to cast a single pod. Many of these Thumbs may be less familiar to you, but they are crucial parts of the site's past and present. Doug Tabacco and Mike Watson make up our frighteningly competent web coding team, and are the only reason we have a site that works. Dave Eggers is a longtime collaborator who has kept our excellent community forums in shape since long before the podcast began. And James "Spaff" Spafford and "Bronstring" Marek Bronstring are Original Thumbs who are responsible for the site's original Thumbcast as well as the short-lived Idle Thumbs UK. We then retire and speak of games and oddities. You'll hear the ill-placed but long-awaited follow-up to our GDC '11 discussion about how Phaedrus almost made it into Jurassic Park: The Video Game and some discussion about Peter Molyneux and his Twitter doppelganger petermolydeux, who has inspired an upcoming worldwide series of game jams called "What Would Molydeux?" If you live near San Francisco, New York, Brighton, Boston, Melbourne, Montreal, or Seattle and you enjoy making video games, sign up!

In this episode of the Kickstarter Progresscast we start talking about the story behind Thirty Flights of Loving, then spin off to discuss upcoming indie game FTL, Flotilla, and Full Spectrum Warrior. Plus there's a bunch of Kangaroo Jack content at the end, for some reason.

As you know, the original Idle Thumbs podcast lineup included our dear friend Nick Breckon, who also caused the podcast's original destruction when he left the picturesque foggy hills of San Francisco for the nondescript suburban flatness of Maryland. As you do not know, leaving the familiar weekly routine of recording Idle Thumbs inflicted grievous harm on Nick Breckon's psyche. Unable to cope with the sudden absence of a regular podcast cycle, Nick subconsciously developed an alter ego podcasting identity known as F. Nick Breckon. Along with a growing slate of multiple personality co-hosts, F. Nick continued to record video game podcasts. Each week since, an audio reel containing the latest episode of the F. Nick Breckoncast has appeared at Idle Thumbs' San Francisco headquarters. This week's reelblast was unusually coherent. And so, after much deliberation, crouched behind the protective shield of this backers-only Kickstarter update page, we have decided to share Transmission 87 of the F. Nick Breckoncast with you, our most loyal and dedicated of readers.

Enjoy this conversation with Kickstarter collaborator and artist extraordinaire Vincent Perea. He joins us for Progresscast The Third One to briefly discuss his process and then lengthily discuss The Legend of Zelda continuity and McDonald's Chicken McNuggets. It's a hefty cast, befitting our guest's prodigious talent and love of fast food poultry chunks.

This may come as a shock to you, but sometimes we talk about video games even when there are no microphones in front of our faces. We were surprised as well when this happened last week, so halfway through a conversation about Dota 2 we hastily scrounged up a portable recorder and set things right. We have replaced our traditional sirens with the maddening constant hum of several large kitchen appliances. Please enjoy it.

Wow. There are no words, readers. But as there is this text field here on the update page, we're going to have to try to find some. We are floored by your gratitude and support. It never occurred to us that we'd meet our goal in a day, nay, a twelfth of a day. So here is our Progresscast: The Second One, recorded last night when we all reconvened to discuss the madness that had just happened.

Thanks so much for helping us cast pods into faces--we have big plans for the podcast and for the site. This is the first of what will hopefully be numerous short podblasts we release over the course of this campaign as we get Idle Thumbs back up and running. (We recorded this before the Kickstarter campaign went public, so we didn't expect it to already be funded by the time this update went up! You guys are the best! Thank you!)