Lessin Boys' Podcast
stories, lessons & conversations sam lessin makes for his three boys.
new episodes posted as they're made. subscribe by email to get notified.
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How Minecraft Was Made
The story of one Swedish kid named Markus Persson who spent his whole childhood writing computer code alone in his bedroom — and then, working at night after his real job, made the best-selling video game in human history. He had no plan. He had no team. He just kept building. He sold the company for two and a half BILLION dollars. Then things got complicated. A story about what happens when one person makes something the whole world plays.
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How EA Sports FC Mobile '26 Was Made
How a soccer video game on your phone gets built. EA used to have the FIFA name on every soccer game ever — then FIFA and EA broke up. Everybody thought EA would lose. Instead they kept all the actual teams (Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester City), built a smarter game, and FIFA's own game went almost nowhere. The lesson: the brand on the box matters less than the game inside.
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How Jetpack Joyride Was Built
A small studio in Brisbane invented the freemium model, built the best endless runner ever made, and then nearly broke themselves with the success that followed. This is the story of one button, one decision, and how Halfbrick changed mobile gaming forever.
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How Baseball 9 Was Built
The story of Baseball 9 — a baseball video game built by a small Korean studio called PLAYUS SOFT. They didn't have the MLB license. They didn't have a giant company behind them. But they made a baseball game that millions of people would rather play than the official one. How a tiny team beats a giant team — by caring more about the game than the brand.
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How Sneaky Sasquatch Was Built
Sneaky Sasquatch is made by a tiny studio called RAC7 Games — and it might be the best example of how a game should be built. No fail states, no tricks to spend money, just a Sasquatch stealing food and a world that keeps growing with free updates year after year. Sam explains how they did it and why it matters.
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Lessin's Lessons: The Inventor of Tetris
The story of Tetris — told as if you ARE the man who invented it. You are Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian computer scientist working in a state lab in Moscow in the 1980s. You build a little game on a tiny computer, where falling blocks have to fit together. You give it to your friends. They can't stop playing. The game escapes the lab, escapes Moscow, escapes the Soviet Union — and ends up on every Game Boy on Earth. But because you made it on a government computer, you don't own it. For ten years you make zero dollars from the most popular video game on the planet. Then, finally, you get it back.
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Lessin's Lessons: Ada Lovelace
The story of Ada Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron, raised on hard math by a mother determined to keep her away from poetry. She grew up to look at a giant brass calculator built by her friend Charles Babbage and see something he hadn't: that a machine made for arithmetic could one day make music, write stories, and think. She wrote down how to make it do those things. That makes her the world's first computer programmer — about a hundred years before there was a computer to run her programs on.
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