Announcement - December 2023

Announcement - December 2023

Author: Franchise Festival December 2, 2023 Duration: 1:55
Hello listeners, this is your Franchise Festival host Chris. We just wanted to provide a few quick announcements: (1) There is no new episode on the public feed this month, as we’re taking a short break between seasons to recuperate and enjoy the holidays with our family and friends. (2) Patrons will get our annual Game of the Year podcast on or around December 15th. If you’d like to hear it, please subscribe to at patreon.com/franchisefestival for as little as $3/month. You’ll also get access to the full back catalog of bonus shows, including some very strange Resident Evil spinoff episodes and a bunch of indie game coverage from Season 3. (3) We’ll be shutting down our website in 2024. It’s pretty expensive to maintain, and the data indicates that most of you listen either through podcast apps or our Patreon page. Consequently, the Patreon will become our new home on the web. Public feed episodes are still posted there for free listening, so you don’t need to be a member to enjoy it. (4) Finally, our fourth season starts on January 1, 2024. In case you missed it, our plan is to cover Capcom’s Mega Man series from start to finish over the course of eleven shows. We’ll also be releasing patron-exclusive bonus shows on remakes, spinoffs, adaptations, and spiritual successors. We appreciate your interest in the show and look forward to joining you all again next year. We’d also like to express a very special thank you to our patrons: Cheatachu, Celeste, Ed, Loren, Quinley Thorne, Cedric the Owl, Jarathen, and Jasper - you bring joy to our hearts and inspire us to make the best content we can. Thanks for listening, everybody! Goodbye.

Franchise Festival digs into the stories behind the video game series that shaped a medium. Each season is a deep, chronological exploration of a single franchise, tracing its creative and technical evolution from often-humble 1980s origins through to its latest installments. You’ll hear about the design breakthroughs, the business decisions that changed course, and the cultural moments that turned pixels into lasting legends. This isn’t just a review show; it’s about understanding how these interconnected worlds were built, year by year and sometimes crisis by crisis. The podcast favors depth over breadth, spending multiple episodes to fully unpack the development history of noteworthy series like Castlevania, SimCity, or Mega Man. The narrative focuses on the people and processes behind the games-the how and why, not just the what. It’s for anyone who’s ever wondered about the connective tissue between their favorite sequels or the forgotten prototypes that paved the way. Tune in for a thoughtfully researched and structured audio documentary experience, one franchise at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 85

Franchise Festival
Podcast Episodes
Season 1 Episode 7 - CD-i Zelda Spinoffs [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:16:29
Christian, Hamilton, and Spencer discuss dead franchises which are due for a comeback before launching into an exploration of The Legend of Zelda's unfortunate third-party spinoffs for the Philips CD-i. We unearth one of…
Season 1 Episode 6 - Majora's Mask [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:44:45
Christian, Hamilton, and Spencer discuss The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000) and its 2015 3DS remake. The game's inspirations and fraught one-year development process are explored alongside its uniquely melancholy…
Season 1 Episode 5 - Ocarina of Time (Part 2) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:56:07
Christian, Spencer, and Hamilton take a deep dive into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's dungeon design. The relative merits of the original Nintendo 64 version and 3DS remake are debated. All your favorite kings ar…
Season 1 Episode 1 - Background and The Legend of Zelda [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:10:36
Christian, Hamilton, and Spencer discuss the pre-1986 background of the Legend of Zelda series along with its first Famicom Disk System / Nintendo Entertainment System installment. [temporarily removed]