311: Activision and Acclaim: Inside Stories with Rod Cousens - The Retro Hour EP311

The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast)

The Retro Hour

Technology, Leisure, Video Games

4.9 • 558 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2022

⏱️ 104 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We're joined by industry veteran Rod Cousens to hear some amazing stories from his time as vice president of Activision, the rise and fall of Acclaim Entertainment and the early days of the British micro-computer games scene.

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Show notes:

Nintendo offering free retro video game posters: https://bit.ly/3G6e96M
Decent Street Fighter 2 on Amiga: https://bit.ly/3GaZXJM
Home made Mega Drive dev kit: https://bit.ly/3AQQFBT
Mega Drive dev kits: https://bit.ly/3rYIrTU

Transcript

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0:00.0	Yeah, I'm one of their biggest fans. I've got all the vinyl. First saw them at a tiny little place in Camden. Then as festival headliners a few years back. Now that was special. So there's no chance I'd miss their world tour in London, Lisbon and LA. Good thing I've been saving.
0:19.9	From down the road to across the globe,
0:22.2	saving gets you there.
0:23.7	Join the millions of people already saving with NS&I.
0:27.3	Visit NS&I.com.
0:29.9	Coming up on this week's show,
0:31.8	how to make your own homebrew Mega Drive development kit.
0:35.5	The Amiga family gets a decent street fighter two-pot.
0:38.9	And we go inside Activision and acclaim with Rod Cousins.
0:50.4	The Retro Ail podcast is brought to you each week with our good mates at Bitmap Books.
0:55.6	Now, one of their books you should definitely check out is Commodore 64 a visual compendium,
1:00.6	celebrating the vast library of games that made the C-64 the most popular home computer of the 80s.
1:07.3	You can check that out on the rest of their retro gaming books on their website,
1:19.8	bitmapbooks.com.com.com. Hello and welcome to the Retro Hour podcast episode number 311,
1:24.7	your weekly dose of retro gaming and technology news with me, me Dan Wood. Me Ravi Abbott,
1:29.2	and me Joe Fox. And a very warm welcome to the podcast. It comes out every single Friday and takes you back to the classic days of video games, as we like to call it the
1:35.1	golden age of gaming. Because, you know, we do get new people coming into this podcast all the time.
1:40.4	And Ravi made a good point just before we started recording. He said, why don't we do a little
1:43.5	introduction for people that are just finding us for the first time? Because even though we've been going for six years now, every time we see our podcast rising up the Apple podcast chart, which, you know, happens most weeks. That means we're getting a big influx of new people coming through. So people are joining this ride all the time, aren't they? Yeah. And it's kind of crazy
2:01.4	because we started this as an audio project, which was just like with the mad aim of interviewing
2:07.8	somebody every single week. And that would be anybody from the industry, you know, the creatives,
2:14.5	the kind of management behind it, you know, video game designers and
	...

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