As Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer once famously put it, “There’s never been a better time to be a gamer.”
There’s more choice in video games than ever before, more redeeming arcs, more characters, more cheek-slapping plot twists. And if HBO’s record-breaking run of The Last of Us proved anything, it’s that there’s more space for video game stories to be told on a grander scale.
On video game podcast The Other Castle, Las Vegas couple Andrea Carter and Tom McLaughlin explore the art of video game storytelling through a series of in-depth episodes, peeling back the production history of a game and its surrounding lore. But where other podcasts might skirt around the full game story, The Other Castle never loses sight of the plot, colorfully retelling it like the craziest audiobook you’ve ever heard.
Listening to these hosts re-set the scene of BioShock’s mystifying underwater world or an outlandish bank heist gone wrong in Grand Theft Auto V is an entertaining ride—and a testament to their own storytelling chops.
“Things that I love are learning about how things get made, how stories get told, how characters come together,” says Carter, a former podcast ad buy manager. “And at the time, I didn’t have the dexterity to play a lot of video games. I was a voyeur of the world, but I was curious about it. So I joked with Tom about doing a podcast and a couple of days later, he said ‘What if we did that?’”
Earlier seasons of The Other Castle focused on older games the couple loved from their childhood. For McLaughlin, who used to voice instructional audiobooks, those were the classics. “I got a Nintendo for Christmas in ’88, and never looked back,” he says. “Super Mario Bros. was the very first for me, but the one I would say forever held its claws in me is Final Fantasy VI on Super Nintendo.”
Meanwhile, Pokémon Blue was Carter’s first big catch ’em all. “I fell into the Pokémon craze because I grew up in the ’90s. How could you not?” she says. “But then I put it down and never picked anything up until my mid 20s, when I was scrolling through IGN and saw a free download for the first episode of The Wolf Among Us. I demoed it and lost my mind that that’s what video game storytelling could evolve into.”
A spin on the award-winning Fables comic book series, The Wolf Among Us was a triumph of choice-based storytelling when it debuted, and through wry humor and sharply timed quips, Carter and McLaughlin add a whole new dimension to it on The Other Castle.
Episodes are ambitious for a two-part team with full-time jobs in the cannabis industry. McLaughlin says it takes eight hours to write a two-hour episode, and that doesn’t include actually playing the game or recording the show, which adds anywhere from two to three hours to the process. It’s an obvious labor of love, or as Carter calls it, “an eccentric hobby joke that has become so much of our lives.”
As video games like The Last of Us successfully cross into new mediums, with all-star casts no less, this truly is the best time to be a gamer.
“We’re about to see Ghosts of Tsushima as a movie, and it’s coming from the John Wick director. Like, that’s incredible,” McLaughlin says. “We saw it a little bit when the comic book movies first started happening. Once they started getting more and more closer to the adaptations of the actual source material … that’s when they started actually being good. And we’re seeing that now with the translation of video games.”
Since 2017, The Other Castle has blown up, especially on Spotify, where it has a 4.8 rating and more than 120 reviews. But to the hosts, it’s still just an “eccentric hobby joke,” between two passionate gamers.
“We’re still doing it for us. That’s the important part,” McLaughlin says.
The Other Castle Available on all platforms, linktr.ee/theothercastle. Season 7 premiers August 30.
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