In 2006, Rockstar Vancouver released Bully, an open world action game about a fifteen year old troublemaker surviving a year at a boarding school, and a moral panic arrived long before anyone had played it. On today's episode, David and guest host, Ryan Shepherd, trace how six developers who walked away from a struggling Vancouver studio founded Barking Dog Studios, and how that small team ended up carrying the Rockstar name into a very different kind of game. We follow the shift in art direction, the crunch behind the project, and the Miami courtroom where a judge sat down to see the game for himself. Then we look at how players and critics responded once it finally shipped, and what happened to the sequel that came closer to existing than most people ever knew. Join us as we walk the halls of Bullworth Academy on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.

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In 1994, SETA Corporation released Nosferatu for the Super Famicom, a gothic horror platformer that borrowed its title from a banned 1922 film while its Japanese opening quietly calls the villain Count Dracula. On today's episode, we use that tangled name as a doorway into three centuries of vampire history. We trace the ancient night demons of Mesopotamia and Greece, the Balkan grave exhumations of the 1720s that gave English the word vampire, and the stormy summer in 1816 that turned a peasant corpse into an aristocrat. From there, we follow Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, the American copyright gap that left Dracula open to anyone, and the unauthorized film a German court ordered destroyed. Then we survey the games that carried the Count from a 1979 text adventure and an Intellivision cartridge that let you play the vampire, through the licensed rush of the early 1990s, to the SETA castle that ties it all together. Join us as we chase the monster nobody could own on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.

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In 2014, Monolith Productions released Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, an open world action game built around the Nemesis System, a procedurally generated enemy hierarchy that let every orc remember, evolve, and hold a grudge. On today's episode, David and the guys trace how the game grew out of a cancelled Batman project, dig into the Tolkien lore buried in the appendices that shaped Talion and Celebrimbor's story, and unpack how a mechanic that swept the industry's craft awards ended up locked behind a patent that outlived Monolith itself. Join us as we head into Mordor on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.

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