Interview: Kate Willaert

I speak to games historian and graphic designer Kate Willaert about her research and current projects, as well as her efforts to turn this work into a job.

We also voice our complaints about Google's Usenet archives, discuss the horrible world of YouTube publishing, the struggles of getting your work seen/read/heard as a content creator today, the value of a good hook for getting people interested in history, how to structure a historical narrative, our font choices for writing draft scripts, and much, much more.

Interview conducted 1 May 2021

Links:

• Kate has talked lots about her Carmen Sandiego research, both on Twitter and her blog. Here's one example.
• Tetris: The Games People Play, a graphic novel about the history of Tetris
• The intro to Kate's (eventually) 50-part video series on playable female protagonists
• MobyGames tag for female protagonists (excludes games with multiple playable characters)
• Hardcore Gaming 101 feature on 1980s video game heroines
• The rules governing her 50-part playable female protagonists series are laid out in the intro video and this article
• Atari Compendium's collection of scanned magazines
• The Internet Archive's Magazine Rack
• The Usenet archives on Google Groups are now mixed in with the other groups and not easily browsable, but search still works
• The UTZOO-Wiseman archives on archive.org are a great resource for Usenet posts
• American Radio History
• newspapers.com
• newspaperarchive.com
• Kate's Moonlander article
• Kate's YouTube channel
• I didn't go into specifics on the many significant games made in 1973, so here are several off the top of my head:
• Maze, arguably the first first-person shooter
• Spasim, one of the earliest 3D games
• Airfight/Airace, the first computer flight combat sim (covered on this show in ep2)
• Moonlander
• Empire (the PLATO one)
• David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games...