226 An Oral History of Video Game Oral Histories 🎮 With Matt Leone of Design Room

Colette & Matt Have Entered the Chat

Matt Leone has been a video game journalist since he was 10 years old printing fanzines' on his grandparents' computer.

Very few people read those, but very MANY people have read his incredibly in-depth oral histories of the industry's most influential games and franchises: Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy 7, Crash Bandicoot, Morrowind, and more. In them, he tracks down everyone who touched development to recount the creative and business environments in which they were forged.

After a decade at 1up.com and 13 years at Polygon, he and a merry band of freelancers have taken the oral history project independent, with a subscription-funded site called Design Room.

Colette and Matt sit down with (other) Matt to discuss his career, the process of creating these rich historical documents, his latest piece about "Shadow of the Colossus," and what happens when video game devs don't want to talk — or worse: die without telling their stories.

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