Devs Play

Double Fine’s Greg Rice is joined by Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Studios, for a full play-through of the beloved 1994 platformer "The Lion King." Louis tells the story of how, with a small team and a tight schedule, Westwood developed the spiritual successor to the 16-bit classic "Aladdin" at a time when action platformers were still king and the Disney Renaissance was in full swing. *NOTE* This episode begins with a ~12-minute overview of "Aladdin" to help set up the story of production on "The Lion King."

Programmer on Costume Quest 2 and Mother superfan Ben Burbank shows off selected scenes from the entire trilogy and explains the complicated history of this beloved cult series. Featuring a mix of Japanese and English releases, fan translations, and imported hardware, Ben takes us on a journey through the bizarre cultural mashups and heartfelt story that define Mother.

Massive Chalice producer Anthony Vaughn and artist Geoff Soulis take a trip to the legendary game dungeon of Backbone Entertainment head Mike Mika to play the unreleased Gauntlet DS. The plug was pulled on Gauntlet DS shortly before its release after unfortunate events caused the title to be bumped from one publisher to another. Hear the untold story of how this labor of love never saw the light of day.

Hack N Slash creator Brandon Dillon and producer Matt Hansen get to the roots of Brandon’s inspiration by cracking open the NES classic The Legend of Zelda, literally. After taking apart the cartridge, de-soldering and dumping the rom, and booting the game up in an emulator, Brandon sets about altering the running memory of the game to cheat his way through and unlock some unexpected secrets about how the game was developed.

Doom history enthusiast and Spacebase creator JP LeBreton joins id Software co-founder John Romero as the two play though the first episode of Doom, “Knee Deep in the Dead,” in its entirety. John Romero’s run through each level turns up fresh and encyclopedic insight into how this genre-defining title was designed and set the stage for first-person action games for years to come.

In the season finale of DEVS PLAY, speedrunner Stephen "SMK" Kiazyk sits down with Tim Schafer and members of the Psychonauts development team to demonstrate how certain bugs and glitches can be exploited to skip entire sections of the game.