My initial plan for the first December episode was a Star Wars themed episode, but the concept went through so many changes before I was satisfied with an idea – and the games I was going to cover kept switching around. By the time I felt like I could write something, there wasn’t enough time. I knew the GOTY episode was going to be big and crazy and logistically complicated, so I wanted the first December release to be an easy one.
At the far end of October I decided to push that Star Wars idea way back and do it at another time, which meant I needed to pull something out of my arse for the first half of December. I wanted to do a Christmas themed episode because it would be weird to ignore Christmas, my favourite time of year, on my own podcast. But no match-ups were clicking for me, or the ones that did make sense would require more planning and research time to put together in a satisfactory manner.
Eventually, I thought about Christmas specials. They’re usually ABOUT Christmas, above all else and sometimes they might even throw out the standard formula or tone to be more Christmassy. The UK Office did a Christmas special that ended with a hopeful tone, Community made their first Christmas episode stop motion animated, some shows would introduce musical numbers where musical numbers never used to exist. With that in mind, I thought about using a different format for this episode. My first idea was way too complicated to pull off at such short notice so I set that aside for 2025 and settled on something more small scale and skit-based.
It was super easy to write, and I kept most of the skits simple until the final scene. Slipped in a GamesMaster reference as a shout out to 1UP Pod’s GamesMaster Revisited series, some of the most fun I’ve had doing podcasts. I wish I got to spend more time on each game but I was trying to keep it as economical as possible. It turned out to be the shortest episode I’ve done by quite a margin. Things were going really smoothly until it came time to do the elves. The audio trickery was a real pain in the ass to get right, it was even more annoying than trying to make goblin voices for the Dungeon Keeper episode because at least in that episode they talked nonsense. Half of my editing time on this admittedly short episode was spent working on the elf dialogue.
But I got to a point where I was satisfied enough with it and just went with it.
Since it was Christmas, I made sure to end on a sincere moment of hope (with a violent execution to cap things off) because it’s a tough time of year for people and it has been a tough time for me in the past. I am very grateful for the life I have now and the caliber of Christmasses I now get to have, and it’s only because I kept going. It’s also partly because I did a podcast many years ago on FF7 that caught the ear of my now fiancee. I wanted to pass along the hope for others who might not see it right now – just keep going.
And possibly host a podcast on an old PlayStation game, if you can.