Now that the PlayStation Experiment episode 1 has been out a couple days, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the production of the episode, the influences of the series, and my plans for it going forward.
First of all, a HUGE thanks to everyone who has watched the video, promoted it, and sent positive feedback my way. I'm overjoyed that people are digging it! I had fairly low expectations for how it might be received out of the gate, so it's truly a very pleasant surprise and much appreciated.
As far as influences go, obviously Chrontendo was a huge one. I had been starting to experiment with making videos last year, but the idea for this series really crystalized when I rewatched Chrontendo while I had COVID last July. I love the way that Chrontendo presents the history of the NES/Famicom (and its competition in Chronsega and Chronturbo) at the level of individual games, which highlights the slow evolution of video games through the third and fourth generations of consoles and even brings up minitrends like the wave of Portopia clones and the influence of Druaga leading to a wave of games obsessed with obscure hidden secrets.
Retro Pals' PlayStation Year One/Zero was also a huge influence. I love the work that they're doing now primarily through their streams, but that series really planted the idea in my head that the PlayStation 1 was the perfect console to chronogame. Jeremy Parish's various Works series are another favorite, and I love how he has slowly expanded that world to filling in the gaps from the NES/Famicom's competition to the Virtual Boy.
I'm also a longtime fan of documentaries and video essay work in general. I've watched a lot of Adam Curtis over the past few years, and I'm sure that's seeped into how I approach constructing a video.
I decided to go with the format of longer videos covering multiple games because I want to make each episode a slice of what you might see on the store shelves at any particular time. The strength of the PlayStation was in its variety, and I wanted to have a kind of a kaleidoscopic effect of showing how on any given week the PlayStation might receive a 2D traditional JRPG, a surprisingly deep simulation of managing a burger restaurant, a prerendered CG adventure game, a 3D fighter based on some long-forgotten tokusatsu, and probably at least a couple pachislot and mahjong titles.
That being said, I don't think the nearly two hour runtime of episode 1 is sustainable long-term. I said in the intro of the episode that future videos will be around an hour in length, and I'm going to stick to that. The game review segments in episode 1 are a little over 10 minutes on average, but I expect that to go up over time as we start getting RPGs and adventure games that are more complicated. Episode 2 has mostly smaller games, but it also has King's Field, which I expect to be the longest review yet. I anticipate that eventually episodes might only cover 3 or 4 games on average (i.e. 15-20 minute reviews on average). I also want to occasionally go really in-depth on some games with hour+ standalone reviews (these will probably also have a big surrounding history/context component).
This also led me to another decision that's a slight change from my original plans: I'm going to break out the coverage of other consoles into separate videos. I don't intend to do full chronogaming runs of all the other fifth generation consoles, but I want to cover at least the important exclusives (including some of the slightly off the beaten path stuff like Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari on Saturn and Wonder Project J2 on N64). There are also some games on the other consoles that I want to give the in-depth review treatment. I would really like to go in on the weird world of 3DO exclusives at some point.
The next video I plan on doing will be the Saturn's Japanese launch. The Saturn got off to a really slow start: There are five launch titles and three more that followed in December. Three of them are also on PlayStation, so I'm going to cover the other five. Then PlayStation Experiment episode 2 proper will bring them up to parity by covering the remainder of the PlayStation's December 1994 releases.
I don't have a timeline on when that will be done yet, but I expect that it will be a lot quicker than it took to make the debut episode. I started working on this project in a very disorganized manner, which I've been slowly putting a process around. I also have a much better handle on Premiere Pro now, so there's less of a learning curve.
The most important part, to me at least, is that even after a lot of hard work and frustration putting together the two hour debut, I'm still excited to do more of this shit. It feels like the right vehicle to hurl all my video game bullshit out into the world.