Lessin Boys' Podcast
stories, lessons & conversations sam lessin makes for his three boys.
new episodes posted as they're made.
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🎙️
Whose Amazing Life: The Man Who Named the Ancient Giants
Here's a question to sit with for a moment. Imagine you're looking at a bone. Not just any bone — a massive, strange, impossible-seeming bone pulled from the English countryside in the early 1800s. The bone is enormous. It doesn't match any living creature you've ever seen. It doesn't match any...
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🕯️
Lessin's Lessons: What Death Really Means
Dad tackles the big one: why living things die, what actually happens to the body, and what every culture -- including our own Jewish tradition -- believes lasts on after we're gone. Honest, a little sad in places, but mostly a reminder to love the people around you while you're here.
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💎
Diamonds, Pencils, and Soccer Balls: The Wild Story of Carbon
For Mav: how scientists proved diamonds and pencil lead are made of the exact same stuff, then discovered a brand new soccer-ball-shaped molecule of carbon that won a Nobel Prize — plus the one-atom-thick material peeled off with Scotch tape.
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🔬
What Are the Nobel Prizes, Actually?
Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics — a tour of all six Nobel Prize categories, plus the youngest winner ever (age 17) and a songwriter who won for Literature.
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🥇
The First Nobel Prize Winners Ever
In 1901 five people won the very first Nobel Prizes: the man who discovered X-rays, a chemist, a doctor who saved kids from a deadly disease, a poet, and two peacemakers. Meet the original class.
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🏅
The Man Who Invented the Nobel Prize
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and got rich — then a newspaper accidentally printed his obituary while he was alive, calling him 'the merchant of death.' Horrified, he gave away his whole fortune to invent the Nobel Prize instead.
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⚫
How to Play Go: Early Strategies for Kids
Now that you know Go's 2,500-year history, here's how to actually play it -- the real rules, plus three simple beginner strategies (corners first, stick together, watch for atari) to help you win your first real games.
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🚂
The History of Ticket to Ride
A designer's first train board game flopped, so he went back to the drawing board and stripped almost everything complicated out of it. The result: Ticket to Ride, a Game-of-the-Year-winning game so simple it's taught to grandmas and gamers alike in ten minutes flat -- and one of the best-selling board games ever made.
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🌍
The History of Risk
How does a French filmmaker who won an Oscar for a movie about a balloon end up inventing one of the most famous board games in the world? Today Dad tells the true story of Risk — from a Cold War-era hit about conquering the globe to the game that later invented the whole idea of a 'legacy' board game that changes forever every time you play.
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The History of Go, the Board Game
It looks like just black and white stones on a grid, but Go is one of the oldest games on Earth — invented in ancient China over 2,500 years ago. For decades it was the one game computers couldn't beat humans at, until a program called AlphaGo made history in 2016.
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🏴
The History of Sealand
An abandoned WWII sea fort, a pirate radio broadcaster who crowned himself Prince, and a helicopter coup attempt -- the true story of Sealand, the tiny self-declared country off the coast of England that no nation on Earth officially recognizes.
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📱
The Invention of the iPad
Before there was an iPhone, Apple actually had a secret tablet prototype — but Steve Jobs shelved it to build the iPhone first. Years later he brought it back, sat down in a leather chair on a San Francisco stage, and introduced the iPad. Find out why people made fun of the name, how fast it sold, and how it ended up in classrooms, hospitals, and airplane cockpits around the world.
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📱
The Invention of the iPhone
Before 2007, phones had buttons and the iPod was just a music player. Dad tells the secret story of how Steve Jobs and a locked-down Apple team combined a phone, an iPod, and the internet into one device controlled by touch — and how the App Store a year later changed the whole world.
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🚗
The History of Waymo
How a secret Google side project from 2009 turned into Waymo, the self-driving car company giving millions of real driverless rides today. Cuju... wait, wrong episode! This one's about robot cars, lidar spinning hats, and the blind rider who took the first fully driverless trip on a real street.
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🏝️
The Story of Alcatraz
From Island of the Pelicans to a fort to Al Capone's toughest prison to a mystery escape that's never been solved — the true story of the rocky island right in San Francisco Bay.
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🎿
The History of Skiing in Jackson Hole
Long before it was one of the gnarliest ski towns on Earth, Jackson Hole was just a fur trapper's snowy valley. From a 1939 rope tow to a tram that climbs 4,000 vertical feet, and the terrifying jump into Corbet's Couloir — here's the real story of how it became a skiing legend.
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The Invention of Soccer
Everyone says the English invented soccer — but the real story starts 2,000 years earlier with Chinese soldiers kicking a feather-stuffed ball through a net, and Japanese nobles playing a no-hands game just to keep it in the air. Find out how a heated argument at a London pub in 1863 turned an ancient, worldwide idea into one official global sport.
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💰
The Invention of Money
Before money existed, a farmer with a bunch of chickens who wanted shoes was basically stuck. This episode follows money's wild 4,000-year journey — cowrie shells, a Lydian king's stamped gold coins, Chinese paper receipts, Nixon cutting the dollar loose from gold in 1971, credit cards, and Bitcoin today.
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⚡
The History of Pokemon
A Japanese kid nicknamed 'Dr. Bug' loved catching real bugs near his house — until the ponds got paved into parking lots. So he built a video game where kids could keep catching creatures anyway. Decades later, that idea became Pokemon, a trading-card empire now worth more than Star Wars, Marvel, and Harry Potter combined.
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The Invention of the Car
A French engineer's steam wagon crashes into a wall in 1769. A German engineer named Karl Benz builds the first true car in 1886 — then his wife Bertha secretly drives it 66 miles with a hairpin and a garter, inventing the road trip (and the gas station) by accident. Plus how Henry Ford's assembly line made cars for everyone.
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⛏️
The California Gold Rush
In 1848 one pea-sized flake of gold set off a stampede of 300,000 people, built San Francisco practically overnight, and gave California its nickname. Ghost ships buried under the city, $100 eggs, and the biggest secret of all: the people who got richest never dug at all. Plus: why Levi's jeans exist.
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🌉
The History of San Francisco
From a foggy Ohlone fishing village to a Gold Rush boomtown that burned twice and rebuilt bigger both times -- the wild true story of San Francisco: the '49ers, the 1906 earthquake, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Summer of Love, and the birth of Silicon Valley, all told by Dad.
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🌭
The History of Chicago
It started as a swampy river crossing named after wild onions -- and became the hog butcher for the world, then burned to the ground, then rebuilt itself into the birthplace of the skyscraper. Meet Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black Haitian-French trader who founded the city, and find out how a wild onion patch became one of the great cities on Earth.
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The History of New York City
From a Native American people called the Lenape and a ship captain looking for a shortcut to Asia, to a tiny Dutch trading post, a giant canal, twelve million immigrants through Ellis Island, and skyscrapers reaching for the sky — Dad tells the wild true story of how New York City got built.
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🤥
The Liar's Paradox and Gödel's Secret Sentence
This sentence is false. Say it out loud and your brain starts spinning in circles — true, false, true, false, forever. Dad shows you how a mathematician named Kurt Gödel snuck that exact same trick into real math, and used it to prove there will always be true things that math can never prove about itself.
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🧩
Why No Rulebook Can Know Everything (And Stay Honest)
Same true fact as before, but grounded in something kids can actually picture: a school answer key made of index cards, one broken card that can prove anything, and one special card that can never be marked true or false.
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🧬
Why Is Carbon So Important to Life?
Every living thing on Earth — you, the dog, the trees outside — is carbon-based, and it's not an accident. Dad breaks down carbon's secret four-armed molecular superpower, why silicon never had a shot at being life's building block instead, and how the carbon in your own body was literally forged inside a dying star billions of years ago.
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🧪
The History of the Periodic Table
That colorful chart in every science classroom wasn't handed down finished — it was built by a Russian professor playing solitaire with homemade cards. Dad tells the story of Mendeleev's wild prediction, the elements found right where he said they'd be, and Marie Curie's discovery that cracked atoms wide open.
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⛷️
The History of Skiing
Skis are at least eight thousand years old — older than the pyramids — and were built for survival, not fun. Meet the stubborn Norwegian farmer who invented the turn, and the railroad engineer who borrowed a banana-loading machine to invent the chairlift.
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The History of Minecraft
The best-selling video game in the history of the world was made by ONE person at his kitchen table — and its most famous monster was born from a typo. The amazing true story of Minecraft: the ten-dollar 'unfinished' game that sold 300 million copies and became a .5 billion classroom.
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The History of LEGO
The most popular toy on Earth started with a broke carpenter in a tiny Danish village — and it almost vanished forever. Two fires, one crazy plastic machine, a magic click patented at exactly 1:58pm, and the greatest comeback in toy history. Plus: why six little bricks can make 915 MILLION different combinations.
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The Founding of Apple
In 1976, two guys named Steve started a computer company in a garage — funded by selling a VW bus and a calculator. One founder got cold feet after 12 days and sold his 10% stake for $800. Here's how Apple really began.
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The Invention of Soccer
In 1863, a room full of London football clubs argued so hard about ball-carrying and shin-kicking that they split into two different sports. Meet the lawyer who wrote the rulebook for the game the whole world now calls soccer.
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🏀
The Invention of Basketball
In December 1891, a gym teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts got a two-week homework assignment: invent an indoor game that wouldn't hurt anyone. James Naismith grabbed a soccer ball, nailed up two peach baskets, and basketball was born — ladder retrievals, thirteen original rules, and all.
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The Invention of the Flushing Toilet
Did you know a king had a flushing toilet almost 4,000 years ago... and then people forgot how great it was for 2,000 years?! Sam tells the wild true story of Queen Elizabeth's clever godson, a Scottish watchmaker's genius bent pipe, and the real Mr. Crapper — the guy whose actual last name became a bathroom word!
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☂️
The Invention of the Umbrella
Four thousand years before raincoats, ancient kings used umbrellas as portable thrones of shade. Then a Persian queen figured out you could carry your own shade, a brave Englishman got laughed at in the street for using one in the rain, and a pile of leftover corset wire in 1852 finally made the umbrella stop flipping inside out.
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🍩
The History of Dunkin' Donuts
How one guy selling donuts and coffee to factory workers in Massachusetts in 1948 built one of the biggest food brands on the planet — and why they dropped 'Donuts' from the name in 2018.
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The History of Dublin Doughnuts
How a rainy old city famous for castles went completely doughnut-crazy! A doughnut stand the size of a garden shed that's been selling doughnuts since 1978, a doughnut boom with lines down the street, and the night people honked their car horns at 2am for Krispy Kreme until a whole neighborhood couldn't sleep. Plus: why the hole in the doughnut is the real invention.
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🌉
The Invention of Bridges
How did humans beat the river? With bridges made of GRASS that outlasted empires, a Roman bridge you can still walk across 2,000 years later, a bridge in London with 200 houses on top of it, and the amazing mom who secretly finished the Brooklyn Bridge. Plus the true story of why our own Golden Gate Bridge is orange — the color was supposed to be temporary!
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The Invention of the Lightbulb
Thomas Edison did NOT invent the lightbulb — at least not the way you think! The real story has twenty inventors, a glowing piece of burnt sewing thread that lasted thirteen hours, explorers hunting six thousand kinds of bamboo, and one big lesson about never giving up.
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The Invention of Football Cards
Who made the very FIRST football card ever — and why? The answer involves cigarette factories in 1894, a mystery player with no name that stumped collectors for 100 years, and a penny stick of bubble gum that turned cards into a playground craze.
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The History of Football Cards
From tiny tobacco pack giveaways in the 1890s to multi-million-dollar Mahomes rookie cards today — the wild, surprising story of how football trading cards were born, crashed, and came roaring back. Learn what makes a rookie card worth millions, why the 80s card boom went bust, and how a tiny piece of cardboard can sell for more than a car.
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The History of Hot Wheels
From a garage in California to six billion cars sold — the wild story of how Hot Wheels was invented, why those little cars are so fast, the mystery of the Sweet Sixteen, and the rarest Hot Wheels car in the world worth over a hundred thousand dollars. Buckle up.
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Why Are They Called the Jets? The Hidden Stories Behind NFL Team Names
From the meatpacking company that named the Packers to the Boy Scout mayor who named the Chiefs — Sam digs into the surprising, accidental, and deeply local origin stories behind every NFL team name. Why do the Ravens honor a poet? Why were the Señors rejected? Why did the Bears have to be bigger than the Cubs? Every name has a story, and most of them are weirder than you'd think.
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👟
The Nike Origin Story
How Phil Knight turned a $1,000 investment and a trip to Japan into Nike — the $50 billion brand built on a waffle iron, a Swoosh, and athlete obsession.
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🎡
The Amazing History of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk
Did you know that one of the most fun places in California has been there for over 115 years? We're talking about the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk — where a roller coaster is a National Historic Landmark, a merry-go-round is over 100 years old, and the whole place has survived earthquakes, floods, and even a World War. Come find out how it all started!
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🎾
How Tennis Was Invented
From monks in France hitting balls over church nets, to a British Army Major who invented lawn tennis in his backyard in 1873 — the wild true story of how the sport we love was born. Plus: why 'love' means zero, why the ball is yellow, and why the scoring goes 15, 30, 40.
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How Google Was Born
Two Stanford students with a wild dream — to organize ALL the world's information. The amazing true story of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and how Google grew from a garage project into the most powerful company on earth. From BackRub to billions!
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⛵
The Invention of Boats — Remake
From a floating log to Polynesian star-navigators crossing the Pacific with bare feet — how did humans learn to cross the ocean? This is the story of the invention that connected every civilization on Earth, and why Sam thinks boats might be the most important invention in history.
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Lessin's Lessons: The Creation of the Earth
Four and a half billion years ago, there was no Earth — just a cloud of gas and dust floating in space. Discover how our planet was born from collapsing stardust, how a Mars-sized crash made the Moon, how the first rains filled the oceans, and how tiny life forms eventually led to you. Plus: the wild truth that everything in your body was made inside an exploding star.
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✈️
The Invention of Airlines ✈️
From 12 seconds in the air at Kitty Hawk to carrying billions of passengers around the world — discover the amazing story of how humans learned to fly, and how commercial airlines turned a crazy dream into everyday life. Did you know the first airline ticket ever sold cost just $5?
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The Invention of Boats ⛵
How did humans first learn to sail across oceans? From simple logs to Viking longships to massive container ships, discover the incredible story of how boats changed everything — enabling trade, exploration, and connection across the entire world.
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Lessin's Lessons: The Invention of Science
How did humans go from making up stories about gods to actually figuring out how the world works? Dad tells the amazing story of how science was invented — from curious Greeks asking 'why?' to Galileo dropping cannonballs off a tower to Newton getting bonked by an apple. This is the story of the greatest method ever invented: science.
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🏀
The Creation of the NBA
From a peach basket nailed to a gym wall in 1891 to hockey arena owners who needed to fill empty seats in 1946 — this is the wild origin story of the NBA. Learn about the 24-second shot clock that turned basketball from boring to explosive, and how the league almost died three times before becoming the greatest basketball league in the world.
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The Invention of Football
Before the NFL, before helmets and touchdowns — how football evolved from a chaotic college soccer game in 1869 to Walter Camp's genius rules at Yale, to Teddy Roosevelt accidentally saving the game by legalizing the forward pass. The story of how America's favorite sport was built rule by rule.
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The Founding of the NFL
How did the NFL start? In 1920, a group of guys sat on car hoods in an Ohio car dealership and invented professional football. From Olympic champion Jim Thorpe to Papa Bear George Halas, this is the wild true story of how America's favorite sport went from muddy fields and leather caps to 100-million-viewer Super Bowls.
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📡
Whose Amazing Life: The Man Who Sent Words Through the Air
A story about a twenty-one-year-old who built a device in his attic that could ring a bell across a room with no wire, and then spent the next decade proving he could send a signal across the English Channel, and then across the entire Atlantic Ocean — the impossible signal that launched the wireless age.
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📞
Whose Amazing Life: The Voice Across the Wire
A story about a boy who watched his mother go deaf and became obsessed with the science of sound — who then spent his nights in a rented attic in Boston trying to figure out if you could send the actual shape of a human voice through a wire, and discovered that you could.
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🤔
Whose Amazing Life: The Man Who Asked Everything
A story about a short, ugly man who wandered the marketplaces of Athens asking questions until powerful people realized they didn't know what they thought they knew. He wrote nothing down, was sentenced to death for asking too many questions, and his ideas are still argued about today.
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🏛️
Whose Amazing Life: The Boy Who Conquered the World
A story about a boy tutored by Aristotle who led cavalry charges at eighteen, crossed into the largest empire in history at twenty-two, and spent a decade marching across the known world without losing a single battle — then died at thirty-two, before he could see what he'd built become.
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⚔️
Whose Amazing Life: The Iron Chancellor
A story about a man who seemed to be going nowhere — lazy student, failed farmer, brawler — who became the most powerful diplomat in the world and assembled a brand-new country out of dozens of separate pieces through three precisely calculated wars.
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🦁
Whose Amazing Life: The Rough Rider
A story about a sickly boy who couldn't breathe, who decided to build himself into something unstoppable. He became a cowboy, a war hero, and then the youngest president in American history — and he created the national parks to make sure the wild places that remade him would last forever.
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Whose Amazing Life: The Man Who Lit the World
A story about a boy born during a lightning storm who grew up to invent the electrical system that powers the modern world. He could build entire machines in his mind before touching a single tool — and he dreamed of giving the world free electricity forever.
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Whose Amazing Life: The Fastest American in Norway
The story of a kid who grew up on the move — Montana, Alaska, the mountains — who showed up at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics and became the first American man ever to win two alpine medals at a single Winter Games.
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Whose Amazing Life: The GS Revolutionist
A kid from the Utah mountains who became the most dominant giant slalom skier in history — winning two Olympic golds and four World Championships — by inventing a technique so revolutionary the sport had to change its own rules. Can you guess who it is before the final sentence?
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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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🎮
The History of Nintendo
From a 19th-century playing card company to the creators of Mario, Zelda, and the Switch — the story of how Nintendo survived near-bankruptcy, invented the Game Boy, nearly got destroyed by Sony, and built the best-selling console of the modern era. Featuring Gunpei Yokoi's genius of 'withered technology,' Miyamoto's obsession with how games feel to touch, and the CEO who cut his own salary to save his engineers' jobs.
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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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