My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin

Elise Kova is a fantasy novelist whose rise from online serial writer to international bestseller has made her one of the defining voices in modern fantasy. She began writing young, producing her first novella in sixth grade, and later returned to storytelling in earnest when she started Air Awakens in 2012 as a hobby, posting chapters online and building an early community of devoted readers. After querying the book without success, she chose to publish it independently in 2015, a decision that gave her full creative control and transformed her career.

Within a year she had become a full-time author, and soon afterwards her work began appearing on bestseller lists, from USA Today to the New York Times. Since then, her novels have reached readers around the world, selling millions of copies and spawning a string of beloved fantasy series, including the Loom Saga, Married to Magic, Dragon Cursed and Arcana Academy. Next, she returns to that world with Prince of Swords, one of her most eagerly awaited books yet, publishing in July 2026.
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Brendan Greene is a game designer whose work reshaped the landscape of competitive multiplayer video games. Raised on a barracks in County Kildare, he grew up in an army family with little more than an Atari 2600 for company. He studied Fine Art in college, taught himself web design, and spent years freelancing — even moving to Brazil — before rediscovering video games through the DayZ mod for Arma 2.

What began as hobbyist tinkering on Reddit forums became something much bigger when he created the Battle Royale mod in 2013, inspired by the cult Japanese film. Three years later, the mod became PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. PUBG’s brutal, hundred-player survival format exploded into a global sensation, helping cement the battle royale genre as a dominant force in modern video games. Now, through PlayerUnknown Productions, he has returned to his fascination with emergent storytelling with Prologue: Go Wayback!, a game that challenges players to navigate nature’s unforgiving systems and carve their own path through the wilderness.
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Stephen Totilo is an American journalist whose career has helped redefine how video games are reported and understood. After studying at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, he became MTV News’ first dedicated video game reporter in 2005, bringing serious coverage of the medium to a mainstream audience. Four years later he joined Kotaku, where he rose to become editor-in-chief and spent nearly a decade pushing the site toward deeper reporting, broader cultural coverage, and a more ambitious vision of what games journalism could be.

My guest later joined Axios, building its games coverage through a widely read newsletter before striking out on his own. Now, as the founder and author of the popular Substack Game File, he continues to pursue the stories he believes matter most—combining deep industry reporting with a conviction that games, and the journalism around them, should be taken seriously.
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Jerk Gustafsson is a Swedish game developer whose career has been shaped by a builder’s instinct — first in the physical world, and then in virtual ones. He left school at fifteen to work as a bricklayer, before discovering PC games in his twenties through Quake, the id Software classic that opened his eyes not only to play, but to the thrill of creating spaces of his own.

After teaching himself level design through modding tools, he joined Starbreeze in 1998, where he worked on acclaimed titles including The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness, eventually stepping into a lead design role. Later, as a founding force at MachineGames, he helped guide the studio’s bold revival of Wolfenstein with The New Order and The Old Blood. Today, as Studio Director, he has overseen the studio’s expansion into some of its most ambitious work yet, most recently with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
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Chandana Ekanayake is a game developer and creative director whose career spans more than two decades of work across some of the industry’s most varied and inventive projects. Born in Sri Lanka he moved to the United States at the age of eight, and grew up watching his parents rebuild their lives from scratch—an experience that shaped both his work ethic and his creative perspective.

After leaving art school early, he taught himself the skills that would carry him into the games industry at just nineteen. There he contributed to titles such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Matrix: Path of Neo. In 2017, he co-founded Outerloop Games, a fully remote studio built around collaboration across continents and a commitment to diverse, personal storytelling. Since then, the studio has released games including Falcon Age, Thirsty Suitors, and now, Dosa Divas, a game that combines turn-based combat and cookery.
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Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025
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