Game journalism, development and Shinra with James Mielke

Get to know the people who make great videogames

_{[Sup Holmes is a weekly talk show for people that make great videogames. It airs live every Sunday at 4pm EST on YouTube, and can be found in Podcast form on Libsyn and iTunes.]}

A couple of weeks ago on Sup Holmes, we got in-depth with industry veteran James Mielke. James has had one of the most amazing careers in gaming, starting with this review of Theme Hospital, first posted almost 20 years ago. From there he ended up working for publications like EGM, 1up, GameSpot, Videogames.com, and many others. Over that time, he dipped his toes into actual game development here and there, having volunteered his likeness for Fatal Frame II and offered design ideas to the team who developed the Turok series on the N64, though it was still a while yet before he’d go all the way.

He finally took the plunge in to full time development in the late 2000’s, after being offered a position working on The Devil’s Third with Tomonobu Itagaki, which he eventually declined. Instead, he took a job as a producer on Q Entertainment’s Child of Eden and Lumines Electronic Symphony. From there he eventually moved on to Q Games, where he became one of the co-managers of BitSummit, Japan’s premiere Indie game festival,

Now he’s working at Shinra Technologies, a company that’s working to utilize the power of cloud integration to allow even the slowest, most out-of-date hardware to run games like a supercomputer. We talked about all that, his thoughts on the rise of Youtube gaming personalities like Pewdiepie, how his approach to conducting an interview mirrors his approach to playing Bloodborne, and a lot more. 

Thanks again to James for hanging out with us, and make sure to tune in today when we welcome Wario Land enthusiast and Owlboy developer Simon “SnakePixel” Anderson to the program.