Looking Back At Podcasts: Dragging Me Into New Eden

"We don't have any advantages, so we can't obey your stupid 'space bushido'. We're going to spy, we're going to use defectors, we're going to lie, cheat, steal and be bastards." 

- The Mittani

Tuesday's look at how my journey through MMOs resulted in my Smuggler's name in Star Wars: The Old Republic got me thinking about how I first became interested in Eve Online.  I've written before that the story around the fall of the Band of Brothers really intrigued me.  But looking back I didn't realize just how much podcasts fueled my interest.

Back in 2008 I found Virgin Worlds, a portal full of MMO podcast goodness.  I actually didn't begin listening to Eve podcasts like Warp Drive Active at first.  Most of my Eve news came from The Van Hemlock podcast which covered all MMOs at the time.  But once February 2009 came around, podcasters started talking about Eve and the BoB takedown.

My two favorite podcasts at the time were The Van Hemlock podcast and Shut Up We're Talking.  In Van Hemlock #38, the hosts Tim Dale and Jon Shute went into an in-depth discussion about Eve Online and the details around the situation.  Jon had been a corp and later an alliance leader while Tim had played on and off for years so the discussion sounded very fascinating to someone who had never played before.  Tim was actually prophetic in stating that someone was going to do the same thing to the Goons and the Goons did to BoB.

Shut Up We're Talking got into trouble when discussing Eve Online, starting with the 2008 year-end episode #40.  In reaction to  SUWT #42, an Eve blogger posted a link to a defense of the game to his blog.  On SUWT #43, the discussion of Eve got a bit more serious as the guests both played Eve in addition to host Darren Love.  The blog of the week on the show belonged to the Eve blogger who posted the link to his blog the show before, Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah.  I checked out the blog and found it was good.

Now here is where things may become interesting for those who follow the Eve blogosphere and Eve podcasts.  On SUWT #44, Kirith Kodachi made his podcasting debut opining on subjects like the introduction of RMT on Vanguard's servers, why CCP began using CGI instead of actual game play footage in trailers and a disbelief that Hello Kitty Online actually existed.


Any post of audio links that led me to play Eve is not complete without a link to Funky Bacon's interviews with Dianabolic and The Mittani.  While not a podcast, just the existence of Eve Radio helped lead me down the path to New Eden.  The interviews were pretty good too.