Agent Palmer

Interspersed with Douglas Coupland’s essays and a Tomb Raider history lesson are actual video game walkthroughs. Step by step instructions for some levels of Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, and Tomb Raider Gold. This is more than your average video game guide, this is what video game guidebooks should strive to be!

The fact that a writer like Coupland could write a first-person Lara Croft essay, as well as his additional thoughts and short history of a game and franchise back in 1998 is amazing.

Whether you have played the game or just know of it, GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 is as much a cultural phenomenon as its namesake James Bond franchise. GoldenEra is a 2022 documentary about the creation and legacy of the game. Before we get into this great documentary, I have to admit that I didn’t play much of GoldenEye 007. I only ever had access to it at friends’ houses who had a Nintendo 64. Genuinely, when it comes to…

While the Olympics have been a bit hit or miss for me, less of it has to do with the network and more of it has to do with time zones, I have caught some of it, and of course, the USA’s win in the Gold Cup has continued the summer of soccer, but sports is not the only thing I have been consuming this summer.

I have been watching and listening to other things as well, plus my regular podcast habit (with a few new ones I’ll be mentioning), and my reading, means that there is literally always something to consume.

On February 26th, 2021, James Turner commenced the final stream of season one of his Punch-A-Chunk world. The culmination of 13 months of work was, based on the reaction from his chat, as therapeutic to those watching during a pandemic as it was to James himself.

The mood in the chat began both celebratory and thankful. What started as a pre-pandemic joke in February 2020 clearly became a salvation for both James and his viewers as the community grew.

It would seem illogical at best to expect that a physical game like Magic: The Gathering would be my entrance into the digital world and the many communities and chats of Twitch, but that is exactly how it happened. And in my case, I’m still close enough to the beginning to understand how it happened.

My podcast, The Palmer Files, is a prime example of my interest in beginnings at the moment, so I figured I would track how this all went down.