Jon Ingold is a British game designer and writer whose work has helped redefine how narrative, choice, and player agency function in interactive storytelling. He began making parser-based text adventures and releasing them free on the internet. After studying mathematics at Cambridge University, he moved into professional game development at Sony PlayStation, where he worked as a designer in the concept group on several unreleased titles.

In 2011, he co-founded the independent studio Inkle, where he has been a driving force behind a body of critically acclaimed narrative games, including 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Overboard!, and A Highland Song. Alongside his studio work, he co-created the open-source scripting language Ink, now used widely across the games industry to build reactive, branching narratives. His latest project, TR-49, is a haunting narrative deduction game built around a mysterious wartime machine, and the urgent act of making meaning from archives before time runs out.

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Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with the reclusive game designer, Phil Fish.

Phil studied game design in Montreal and, after a brief stint working at Ubisoft, left to begin work on a game of his own, a platformer that combined the art style of the Super Nintendo classics of his youth, with perspective-shifting innovations of his own.

Six years in the making, Fez launched in 2012 to near universal acclaim, part of the first wave of so-called indie games. After featuring heavily in the film documentary Indie Game: the Movie, my guest, who is passionately outspoken, became the subject of co-ordinated online attacks, which culminated in his retreat from public platforms, nearly a decade ago.

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Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025

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Before the start of My Perfect Console's fourth season, we revisit a classic early episode with comedian, writer and podcaster, Heather Anne Campbell.

My guest today is an Emmy-nominated writer, sketch comedian, voice actor and performer. As a teenager she studied improv comedy at the famous ImprovOlympic studio in her home city of Chicago, training that prepared her for when she later starred on Whose Line Is It Anyway and the sketch comedy show Key and Peele.

She has worked on the writing staff of Saturday Night Live, The Twilight Zone and, most recently, the sixth season of Rick & Morty. Throughout her career she has also written and talked about video games, not least in her current role as one of the hosts of the popular games-related podcast, Get Played. “Comedy and video-games are the same thing: fantasies within set rules,” she once said. “I love both of them, equally. When I can marry the two in some future project, I'll be complete.”

Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole

Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.