A Trip Down Memory Card Lane
David Kassin and Robert Kassin
Show overview
A Trip Down Memory Card Lane has been publishing since 2020, and across the 6 years since has built a catalogue of 312 episodes. That works out to roughly 300 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a weekly cadence.
Episodes typically run thirty-five to sixty minutes — most land between 55 min and 1h 3m — and the run-time is fairly consistent across the catalogue. The publisher flags most episodes as explicit, so expect adult themes or strong language throughout. It is catalogued as a EN-US-language Leisure show.
The show is actively publishing — the most recent episode landed 4 days ago, with 34 episodes already out so far this year. Published by David Kassin and Robert Kassin.
From the publisher
A Trip Down Memory Card Lane is a weekly video game history podcast that tells one story per episode, guided by the current week in gaming history. Hosted by brothers David Kassin and Robert Kassin, the show explores the stories behind the games we grew up with. It looks at the creative risks, technical limitations, business realities, and human decisions that shaped what players ultimately experienced. It’s a show for anyone who likes knowing how things were made, why certain paths were chosen, and what those moments can tell us about the industry as a whole. If that sounds like you, come take a thoughtful trip down Memory Card Lane with us each week.
Latest Episodes
View all 312 episodesEp.312 – From Rogue to Roguelike: The Story of a Game and the Genre It Started
Ep.311 – Teaching an Elephant to Dance: How IBM's Reluctant Gamble Produced their Personal Computer
Ep.310 – Built to Stay Close: Kawazu, the Q Fund, and the Strange Birth of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Ep.309 – A Fresh Blade: Building Soulcalibur from the Ground Up
Ep.308 – Learning by Dying: How Limbo Built an Entire Language of Silence, Shadow, and Subtraction
Ep.307 – The World That Argued Back: Alternate Reality - The City and the Contract That Broke Its Creator
Ep.306 – No Rainbow, No Gender, No Sequel: The Stubborn Vision Behind NiGHTS into Dreams
Ep.305 – Three Wishes: How the Game Genie Took on Nintendo and Won
Ep.304 – When the Hammer Fell: Quake and the Creative Fracture That Changed id Software Forever
Ep.303 – Sunny Days: How Sesame Street Brought Its Classroom to the Console
Ep.302 – What A Ride: Building Theme Park and the Mind Behind It
Ep.301 – For Super Players: How Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels Stayed Hidden for Seven Years
Ep.300 – Humble Beginnings: The History of A Trip Down Memory Card Lane
Ep.299 – Ground Pounders: Breaking Down the Wall That Built First-Person Shooters with Red Faction
Ep.298 – Follow the Light: How Remedy Found Alan Wake in the Dark
Ep.297 – Too Little, Too Late: Why the Atari 7800 Never Got the Launch It Deserved
Ep.296 – Tee It Up: How Golf (1984) Set the Template for an Entire Genre
Ep.295 – Frame By Frame: The Handcrafted Art That Made Metal Slug (1996)
Ep.294 – When Life Gives You Lemons: An Evolutionary Journey into Portal 2
Ep 293Ep.293 – An Unsolvable Maze: The Secret Algorithm Behind Entombed (1982)
EIn 1982, Western Technologies released \Entombed\ for the Atari 2600, a scrolling maze game published by a division of Quaker Oats that almost nobody played and nearly everyone forgot. In this episode, we trace the game's origins inside a freewheeling Santa Monica development shop, the night a UCLA film student and a math grad student solved a maze problem at a bar, and how the answer got handed off, stripped down, and shipped without anyone fully understanding what they had. We explore the Atari 2600's brutal constraints, what it actually takes to generate an infinite and solvable maze on 128 bytes of RAM, and why a lookup table that worked perfectly stumped researchers for forty years. Our conversation also covers the 2018 paper that went viral, the drunk programmer story that wasn't quite the whole truth, and the moment the man who actually wrote the algorithm finally came forward. Join us as we run the maze, dodge the zombies, and uncover the secret algorithm behind Entombed on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.Read transcript