Five Hours on the Super Nintendo Is Exactly the Right Amount
There are people who are smart, and then there are people who could spend weeks—months, honestly—talking about which Ninja Turtle was objectively the best, why the Super Nintendo was the peak of human civilization, what made the original Ghostbusters work on a structural level, and whether growing up in the nineties conferred some specific advantage that later generations simply don’t have access to. These people are my people.
Radio Nukular is a German podcast hosted by three of them: Chris, a former presenter on the long-running German gaming TV show GameOne; Max, who records rap music under the name Rockstah; and Dominik, who edits a culture and media website and appears to have a sincere thing about cows. The three of them sit down and do deep-dive episodes on the pop culture debris of their collective childhood—games, cartoons, films, school—with a looseness that sounds like they made the whole show specifically for me and are indifferent to everyone else’s opinion.
It’s not flawless. The Simpsons episode was a mess—Max kept dropping out of the connection and the conversation never quite recovered its footing. The Ghostbusters episode went so far off-topic so often that I found myself inside my own daydreams before they’d gotten back around to Slimer, which, if you know me, is not a good sign.
But then there’s the Super Nintendo episode. Almost five hours. Five hours of three grown men arguing about Super Mario World and Street Fighter II and what exactly made that console feel like it had weight and permanence in a way nothing released since quite matches. Dominik—predictably, the cow guy—clearly had no idea what he was talking about half the time, which somehow made it better rather than worse. Guest appearances from German rappers Eko Fresh and Sudden, plus one half of the comedy duo Badesalz, materialized at various points. It became a document of something.
I listened to all of it. During dishes, during walks, once while lying on the floor staring at the ceiling at two in the morning. That’s when you know a podcast has you—not when it’s good, but when it’s good enough that you find reasons to keep going. Chris, Max, and Dominik have a Patreon, and on the strength of that Super Nintendo episode alone, they’ve probably earned it.