Podcasts
Diving Back Into ‘Bioshock’ For its 15th Anniversary! [Safe Room Podcast]
Before diving into this week’s Bioshock discussion, would you kindly give last week’s episode covering Hunt: Showdown a listen?
At the inception of Safe Room, Neil and I had both made mental checklists of games we simply HAD to talk about on the show. Games that we felt so passionately about that one of us would have to whack the other with a stick to get a word in edgewise.
For me, that game would be Bioshock.
Experiencing the descent to the underwater dystopia of Rapture will forever be a formative moment in my gaming history. It sounds like hyperbole, but at the time, Bioshock truly opened my eyes to the storytelling potential of video games.
In an era where my high school days primarily consisted of playing shooters until the wee hours of the morning with friends, Bioshock presented me with a rich, thematically laced world that I’d only thought possible in film and literature.
And 15 years later, the wonderment of what Irrational Games, 2K Boston and 2K Australia were able to achieve within the seemingly simple framework of a first-person shooter is not lost on me.
Helping Neil and I to unpack why Bioshock and its influence are still notable with the medium all these years later is writer Michael Pementel. Apart from being a massive Bioshock fan, Michael is an essayist and pop culture critic who currently writes for Bloody Disgusting and is the staff writer over at the heavy metal news site The Pit. – Jay Krieger
Safe Room is a weekly horror video game discussion podcast with new episodes every Monday on
iTunes/Apple, Sticher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Linktree for additional streaming services.
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Maybe you haven’t thought about your good friend Sweeney Todd in a while, or maybe you have. The 2007 movie is a bit of a memory, though a fond one – it has a healthy 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, for what it’s worth. But 2023’s Broadway revival starring Josh Groban, who your mom thinks is “so talented” (she’s right!), was enough of a hit that its run was extended.
It appears we’re in a bit of a Sweeneyssaince.
For the uninitiated, Sweeney Todd is the story of a barber who kills his customers and disposes of the bodies by passing them off to pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett, who uses them as a special ingredient. But there’s more below the trap door.
Sweeney Todd isn’t just a late 70s musical that turned into a movie; it started as a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (author unknown), told week-to-week in the 1840s. Penny dreadfuls were essentially fiction zines featuring serialized stories that were usually horror-based and cost a penny, leading to the very literal nickname.
The String of Pearls differs from the more well-known Sweeney Todd plot in that it follows the investigation of a missing persons case that leads to the reveal of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s arrangement, as opposed to the more modern iteration which treats audiences to the duo hatching their homicidal plan and then giving the worst haircuts ever. What a delightfully wild reveal that must have been if you were a reader in Victorian London after weeks of wondering what had become of the missing sailor carrying a string of pearls to deliver to a lovely girl.
Kristen and Will discuss the history and future of Sweeney Todd and works inspired by it this week on Guide to the Unknown. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
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