Stay Forever and Mean It
The thing about not gaming anymore is that you still love games—just archaeologically. I don’t own a current console. On Steam I’ve quit everything within five minutes except Civilization V, which has consumed several lifetimes I’ll never recover. But gaming podcasts? I’m obsessed. Specifically the ones about old games, old scenes, the whole improbable rise of an industry nobody took seriously until it ate everything.
Stay Forever is what I listen to when I need that fix. Gunnar Lott and Christian Schmidt—both former editors at Gamestar, Germany’s biggest gaming magazine—do something quietly remarkable: they treat a thirty-year-old DOS title with the same care and intellectual attention you’d give a film. Day of the Tentacle. Alpha Centauri. Ultima. They talk about these games the way you talk about formative books, which is to say with a love that knows the object’s flaws and doesn’t care.
What gets me is the historical texture they bring to it. The backstories, the business disasters, the lone programmers who genuinely changed things—not with a team of hundreds and a publisher with nine-figure budgets, but because one weird person had one weird idea and the constraints of the time forced them into elegance. That world is gone. AAA titles killed it the way the studio system killed certain kinds of filmmaking, and the podcast mourns that without ever becoming maudlin about it.
They disagree with each other too—not for drama but because they carry different memories of the same games, assign different weights to the same experiences. That’s rare. Most gaming content is either hype or grievance. Stay Forever is closer to two people doing archaeology on something they both love, occasionally surfacing something neither expected to find.
Subscribe immediately. Listen while cooking, running, lying in the dark. Then go find the actual games on GOG, where most of the classics live now for a few euros. I’m currently working back through the Fallout series, which was always going to win eventually.