Live From New York, It’s Aftermath Hours Live!

On this week’s very special episode, we come to you live—or at least, in-person—from Town Hall in NYC, alongside two NYC-based gaming luminaries: NYU Game Center director Naomi Clark and Half-Mermaid ( Her Story , Immortality ) director Sam Barlow. As part of the inaugural New York Games Week, we decided to sit down for a long-form discussion of the grimy and inhospitably expensive but also perfect city where most of us (sorry, Luke) live. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin are generally considered to be the country’s video game capitals, but NYC—the main character of Earth—doesn’t loom quite so large. Why is that, especially as a thriving NYC indie scene pumps out more and more GOTY contenders? Further, what keeps triple-A studios from establishing a foothold in the city that gave us Broadway, a place where other art and entertainment mediums thrive? In lieu of that, what kinds of freaks and weirdos (complimentary) do make and play games in New York? And is NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani one of them? We answer all those questions and more while still finding time to digress wildly onto topics like rival black mold subreddits and the video game of everyone’s dreams, as gener…