Dr.Matt Barton

Post by **LDAsh** » (150323)(20:03.22)

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I felt compelled to post here about this dude. I stumbled upon his YouTube "Matt Chat" videos a few years ago from an interview he did with John Romero, and found a treasure trove of others and I've been keeping up with them ever since. He's done a few "ex-id folk" interviews including Tom Hall, Sandy Petersen and Jennell Jaquays, so there's a lot of info there for people like me who are fascisnated by this important piece of computer game history, but the topics go way back to systems that existed before I was even born and even a lot of board-gaming talk and how this all evolved and is connected, right up to discussion about the latest platforms and titles.
Dr.Barton himself is a great interviewer, he asks most questions that I have in my head the moment he asks them and he's very well versed in a wide range of game genres and eras. He seems to know all the classics much deeper than just by name. He really appreciates a good game no matter how much dust needs to be blown off the floppy, has a great sense of humour and is one of the least egotistical "game-brains" I've encountered, while not losing the ability to be critical and purely objective. He knows how to ask the relevant questions and then listen which is a rare quality, so the videos are various lengths and quantities, mostly interviews but some "retrospectives" also, including some of my favourite games of all time. He's also written a couple of highly-regarded books, helped produce a film about games and even tried his hand at game development himself.

So I highly recommend following this guy, subscribing and listening through all of his stuff if you're serious about the history of games and getting some good answers from some very important figures in the industry, especially for developers, this is really valuable material.

http://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8/videos
http://mattbarton.net/
http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/blog/4
http://twitter.com/mattbarton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Barton

Cheers Matt!