rock band | Polygamer

Polygamer #122: Web developer Allison Holt

Posted on February 23, 2022 by Ken Gagne

Allison Holt is a Webby Award-winning software developer with a 23-year-career that includes a decade of experience in the video game industry. She has built websites and backend systems for Turbine, developers of Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online; Harmonix, creators of Rock Band and Guitar Hero; and Curt Schilling’s ill-fated 38 Studios. She is also an accomplished artist, with her commissions appearing in friends’ homes and on the cover of the Transporter Lock podcast.

In this podcast, Allison and I talk about the divide between web developers and game developers; the work that earned the Beatles Rock Band website its own Webby; the ephemeral nature of a digital portfolio; the unrealized potential of 38 Studios’ Project Copernicus; why she left the games industry; and her experience accepting her identity as a transgender woman, and the difference it made in her life.

Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for a transcript and links to resources mentioned in this episode.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:08:35 — 79.5MB) | Embed

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Polygamer #121: Arthur Inasi of Harmonix & Greasy Says

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Ken Gagne

Arthur Inasi has spent the last 15 years at Harmonix, developer of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band rhythm games, working as a sound designer, level designer, voice actor, mocap actor, and more. As creative lead of Dance Central VR, he oversaw the series’ reboot for Oculus virtual reality headsets. His side hustles include producing music under the name M-Cue and hosting the podcast Greasy Says, where he offers unfiltered truths from his career as a brown game developer.

In this podcast, I ask Arthur about his experience collaborating with renowned musicians such as Usher; the educational aspects of Harmonix’s games; the potential in Harmonix’s recent acquisition by Epic Games; the need to mask oneself and be a “chameleon” to fit into the games industry; balancing being assertive and being collaborative; the hobbies that keep him going, and what we can expect from the second season of Greasy Says.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:29 — 66.8MB) | Embed

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Polygamer #19: Elisa Meléndez on avatars, FragDolls, racial diversity & rock bands

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Ken Gagne

Elisa Meléndez recently spoke on a PAX East 2015 panel about how we create and identify with our avatars in virtual game worlds. This is one of just many topics she’s researched as part of her Ph.D studies in comparative sociology — and her academic career is just one of Elisa’s many aspects. In this podcast, she discusses being, in her husband’s words, a "triple threat" — a queer woman of color — in the gaming industry, the whitewashing of PAX East, a sociological perspective on GamerGate, being a FragDoll cadet, how gaming saved her marriage, fronting for the rock band Crimson and getting her music into the Ubisoft game Rocksmith, coming out to her father as bisexual, whether being a badass is sexist — and much, much more! So much, that this episode of Polygamer clocks in at two hours, twice its usual length.

Download the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:07:25 — 59.2MB) | Embed