Stay Forever
Day of the Tentacle broke my brain when I was twelve.
That’s the kind of thing you hear on Stay Forever, a German podcast where two old GameStar editors spend hours talking about games from an era when anything seemed possible. Gunnar Lott and Christian Schmidt have this way of discussing the old stuff—with genuine affection, with cheeky banter that never quite turns mean, with the sense that they’re pumping something real out of each other. These weren’t just good games. They were proof that a different kind of culture was possible.
I’m not much of a gamer anymore. Haven’t owned a console in years, quit most Steam games after five minutes except Civilization V. But I’m obsessed with these podcasts, with listening to someone remember why a janky point-and-click adventure or a complex strategy game mattered enough to shape their thinking.
What gets to me is the structural difference they’re describing. That individual vision could still mean something. You could make something totally strange and find an audience for it. Alpha Centauri, Ultima, the whole early-PC landscape—these games felt unfinished by design, still negotiating with players about what a game could even be. Now everything gets polished into the same glossy shape, tested to death, designed to offend nobody and delight everyone equally. The budget is enormous. The care is professional. It’s all suffocating.
I’ll never replay most of those old games. I don’t have the patience or the time. But listening to someone remember them—really remember them, not in some hagiographic way but with specificity and argument—that connects to something. The nostalgia isn’t for the games. It’s for a moment when computers could still be weird and broken and strange, when failure and strangeness were features, not bugs.
The podcast is the real artifact. Two men trying to explain to anyone listening what that window felt like, why it mattered, why we’re all worse off for the way things evolved. They do this almost casually, between anecdotes about spending student money on PC games, between arguments about which Sierra adventure game was the worst. They’re not trying to convince anyone. They’re just remembering, and I’m just listening, and somehow that’s enough.